Tragedy and Modernity: Honegger and Brahms

Notions of the tragic have changed greatly since the Golden Age of Attic drama and its posthumous codification by Aristotle. Some have claimed that, in Shakespeare’s wake, what we now call tragedy is something entirely different. A (post-)Christian need for redemption as heard, however equivocally, in Honegger’s Third Symphony seems incompatible with tragedy’s iron rule of Fate. Even Wagner, with the exception of Lohengrin, tended to offer redemption rather than catharsis in the ancient sense. Indeed, minor-mode symphonies that do not turn ‘affirmatively’ to the major are rarer than we might expect. Yet those tragic notions, their representation too, have also remained surprisingly close to their source, of which we still speak, in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Would it have seemed strange to ancient writers of tragic drama and verse to speak of symphonies as participating in the tragic and even, in the case of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, of embodying tragedy itself? Doubtless, but then to them the very notion of a symphony would have seemed equally strange.

New Life to Everlasting Themes

Born out of Paris in January 1945, Honegger’s Symphonie liturgique came to life in the strange atmosphere of French ‘liberation’. The end of war’s tunnel, amidst privation, bitterness and general settling of scores, was yet tantalisingly close. The future might, must be better than the recent past, but there was little reason to think it would be devoid of further pain and even tragedy. As if to symbolize life’s dualities more generally, the Symphony was written during wartime and peacetime, in France and Switzerland, where this singularly atypical member of ‘Les Six’ remained a citizen.

It is not intended for liturgical purposes, but rather takes a subtitle for each of its three movements from lines in the Latin (Roman Catholic) liturgy: ‘Dies irae’ (Day of wrath) from the Requiem; ‘De profundis clamavi ad te’ (Out of the deep have I called unto thee) of Psalm 130, recited prior to burial; and ‘Dona nobis pacem’ (Grant us peace) from the Agnus Dei of the Ordinary of the Mass. Each movement, Honegger said, attempted to express ‘an idea, a thought which I should not wish to call philosophical – that would be pretentious – but which represents the composer’s personal feeling’. His intention, he said, had been ‘to symbolize the reaction of modern man against the morass of barbarism, stupidity, suffering, machine-mindedness and bureaucracy’. Herein was ‘a drama played out between three characters, whether real or symbolic: misery, happiness and man [:] everlasting themes. I have tried to give them new life.’

The idea of the ‘Dies irae’, Honegger thought, would pose no problem to audiences who had all lived through ‘years of war and revolution’. Its dark opening, ‘de profundis’ avant la lettre, scurries and snarls by turn. In diabolical, malevolent grotesquerie, it comes close to Prokofiev’s Third Symphony (and thus his opera The Fiery Angel). A militaristic storm, again like Prokofiev, brimming with melody came, Honegger recalled, ‘suddenly, in its entirety, on the short train journey from Basel to Bern’ and was swiftly notated in draft before retiring to bed that evening. A ferocious energy framing wind intonation of the dread words ‘Dies irae, dies illa’ is the driving force of a movement, like its successors, in sonata form. Here that form proves to be principally exposition and developmental yet ultimately reversed recapitulation, subsiding into the opening darkness.

The prayerful second movement represents the tendency of ‘everything remaining of purity, clarity, and confidence in humanity […] toward that force we feel to be above us’. That might be God, or perhaps something from within, borne by each of us ‘in the most secret part of his soul’. Considerably more ambiguous in ‘message’, not least in the inconclusive climaxes to and from which Honegger builds and retreats, the music seems to float in a state of purgatorial suspension. Early responsorial exchanges between string and wind choirs recall the organ (or even Bruckner). If, to an English ear, there sounds an Elgarian nobility to the lower strings, such correspondence is doubtless mere coincidence. A seraphic flute solo evokes religious iconography of old, in flight above the ruins of modernity.

From its title, we might be a little surprised by the realm of the third movement: not that peace which passes all understanding, but the ‘inescapable rise of stupidity in the world: nationalism, militarism, red tape, administration, customs duties, taxes, wars, everything humanity has invented to persecute and degrade him, to transform him into a robot’. It is that stupidity, however, which has finally provoked ‘the cry of despair: “Dona nobis pacem”’. A goose-stepping march of idiocy, ‘la thème de la c…rie humaine’, gathers pace, forces and followers – ‘mechanical geese’ – over lengthy pedals, erupting in terrible ‘pesante’ cries of revolt from the oppressed. A rapt wind choir sings the closing Adagio, ‘pianissimo sempre e dolce’. Above divided strings, melismatic instrumental solos – flute joined by piccolo, violin and cello – take us to celestial C sharp major for ‘a brief meditation on what life could be: calm, love, joy – a bird’s song, Nature, peace’. And yet, the final chord’s ambiguity – what to make of its added notes? – suggests only a temporary peace. Nagging, gnawing doubt remains.

 

Tragedy that Brooks No Dissent

Brahms conceived his Fourth Symphony in very different circumstances, on an Alpine holiday in the Styrian village of Mürzzuschlag in 1884 and 1885. ‘It tastes of the climate here’, he wrote to Hans von Bülow, comparing it to the local cherries’ stubborn unwillingness to ripen: ‘you would not eat them!’ Like Beethoven’s works with similar opus numbers, the Symphony stands on the cusp of the composer’s unquestionably ‘late’ period and puzzled certain early listeners, though it has been long since assimilated into the repertoire. Few symphonies speak with a voice and direction so unambiguous in its Classical tragedy: Mozart’s 40th, Mahler’s Sixth, perhaps a handful of others. Brahms’s Fourth it seems, will always stand among them; defiant, unbending, if no longer incomprehensible as it initially seemed to some listeners, Eduard Hanslick and Clara Schumann among them.

The wistfulness of the first theme perhaps suggests the E minor opening of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. We can sense the melancholy shadows cast by those falling thirds, even when they rise to foretell added sixth harmonies that will colour the entire work. What follows, though, is tighter of structure – no criticism of Mendelssohn, for he and Brahms attempt and accomplish very different things. This was not Brahms’s first musical construction from a chain of falling thirds; the development section of the Finale of his Piano Quartet No. 3 in C minor op. 60 is another example. But to place them first, without introduction, is a further refinement, even declaration of (proto-serial) intent. A recent fashion in Brahms studies has been to emphasize his Romanticism as opposed to a modernist legacy, reflected in replacement of images of the older, bearded composer – forbidding, avuncular, or somewhere in between – with his fresh-faced counterpart. However, an either/or misses the point. This opening could barely stand closer to both Mendelssohn and Webern. This is Brahms’s only symphonic first movement not to repeat the exposition: testament to what Schoenberg would extol as the ‘developing variation’ of ‘Brahms the Progressive’. It is again to Mendelssohn that Brahms stands closest in recapitulating at a point of exhaustion rather than triumph, ‘with all the majesty’, to quote Donald Tovey, ‘of the Norns prophesying the twilight of the Gods’. We move inexorably to Tovey’s ‘grim Amen’. So complete is the sound, we might fancy a larger orchestra were employed; this false tutti is, however, voiced without trombones, held in reserve for the Finale.

The second movement develops likewise by variation. It is heralded by horn calls whose strong hints at C major refer back to intervals and harmonies from the first movement, and forward both to the Phrygian mode of this movement’s close – horns again – and to the Scherzo. Once the home key has been established, the music is warmer, more redemptive, its later ‘sumptuous eight-part string texture’, to quote Malcolm MacDonald, ‘the most gorgeous assertion of the “himmlischer Trost” [heavenly consolation] of E major in Brahms’s output’. The composer of Ein deutsches Requiem and the Vier ernste Gesänge is the most devout of agnostics. Epiphany is enabled by shadows that follow and precede, modal inflections with roots in late Beethoven as well as Brahms’s early-music scholarship.

Brahms’s Scherzo is formidably iron-clad, even for a work so firmly in Beethoven’s tradition. Sonata-form concision both propels and questions the mood of celebration, though certainly not its coiled-spring energy. Intimations of the Finale abound, perhaps only recognized as such in retrospect. Brahms’s celebrated use of the triangle needs no defence, yet received a splendid one from Tovey, who pointed to combination with piccolo and contrabassoon in ‘grotesque poetic aptness to […] bacchanalian fury’.

The idea of the Finale dates back several years. In a conversation around 1880 with Siegfried Ochs and Hans von Bülow, Brahms lamented how little most musicians, then present company included, knew of the treasure trove of Bach’s cantatas. He played on the piano the final movement of Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich (Cantata No. 150), of which he owned a copyist’s manuscript, a gift from Bach biographer Philipp Spitta. Bülow objected that voices would not bring out Bach’s climax with necessary force, at which point Brahms asked, ‘what would you think of a symphonic movement written on this very theme one day?’. It was, however, he admitted, ‘too chunky, too straightforward. One would need somehow to alter it chromatically.’ Brahms thus added a chromatic A sharp – prepared in the first group of the first movement – to the simple theme, heightening tension in transition to the dominant. He also stretched out Bach’s theme to eight bars and had it appear anywhere in the texture, not only in the bass, thereby composing what, Brahms’s own nomenclature notwithstanding, is considered a passacaglia rather than a chaconne.

In immediate departure from Bach, the theme is heard first not in the bass but over a bass line characterized once more by falling thirds. 30 variations ensue, taking us through intervals, tonalities, other musical qualities and relationships new and old. At the beating heart of this world of musical tragedy, invited by the 12th variation’s Orphic flute, sings Harmoniemusik patently longing for a Classical paradise no longer attainable. Trombones solemnly summon the All Souls ‘aequale’ tradition of communion with the dead. The grandeur of the final variation’s ritardando necessitates, like Fate itself, volcanic eruption. And so there is heralded a magnificent ‘Più Allegro’ coda in which, released from passacaglia confinement, music can again freely modulate. The destination to which it storms is never in the slightest of doubt. There is no nagging doubt here. No more than Aeschylus, Sophocles, nor, for all his Christianity, Bach does Brahms in his tragedy brook dissent.

(This essay was originally published to accompany a Salzburg Festival performance by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Herbert Blomstedt.)

BPO/Thielemann - Beethoven, Missa solemnis, 14 December 2017

Philharmonie

Mass in D major, op.123 (Missa solemnis)

Luba Orgonášová (soprano)

Elisabeth Kulman (mezzo-soprano)

Daniel Behle (tenor)

Franz-Josef Selig (bass)

Berlin Radio Choir (chorus master: Philipp Ahmann)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

There are musical works at which, in awe, one strain’s one’s aural neck – and then there is the Missa solemnis (no need, just like the Ninth Symphony, to say whose). It has its detractors; so does Fidelio. However, their accusations, in both cases, seem founded on gross misunderstandings of what Beethoven was doing. Ultimately, they perhaps even add to the works’ stature: almost unquestionably so, I think, in the case of the Missa solemnis. Its extreme difficulty is both the point and not the point. As with all late Beethoven, indeed pretty much all Beethoven, dialectics ensure that difficulty and simplicity, rupture and wholeness, so on and so forth, are not just banally ‘connected’, but inconceivable, conceptually let alone performatively, with one another.

Performance: there’s the rub, or perhaps the greatest rub. I have noticed that, with many honourable exceptions, it is singers who are most likely to condemn those works of Beethoven that include voices. (It is surely an error to name them ‘vocal works’, a mistake that gets close to the heart of the matter.) If you want concessions, to your personal taste, to your ease of performance or listening, concessions to anything really: Beethoven could hardly be less your man. It is not ‘about you’, as the modern slogan has it. And yes, I know very well that I am drawing upon, thinking and writing within, the Romantic myth of Beethoven, of the towering, glowering genius. Such knowledge, whether we like it or no, is the essence of our modern and/or post-modern predicament. Guess what, though? The myth happens to be true. The enigmatic quality and the extreme difficulty are integral to the work; in the complexity of its attempted, impossible mediation between subject and object, they are, just as in Hegel (well, more or less ‘just as’), doing the work of Geist (Spirit), of God, of history, of whatever we want to call it, or It. Calling the Missa solemnis a ‘concert work’ is at best misleading, despite its actual – as opposed to envisaged – performance history. It is not only a sacred work, but a resanctification of, through serious reckoning with, the Mass itself – and not only its text. Reactionaries will not like that, but so what? Nor does Geist.


Performance, however, is not, as it were, the only rub. The business of aesthetics, of reflection upon art, almost immediately, even immanently, arises with this work. Such is modernity – and is this not most likely Beethoven’s most modern work of all? I have long entertained the fantasy – and who knows: sometimes fantasies are realised – that the Missa solemnis in particular and perhaps Beethoven in general would be my retirement job. (Let us leave aside the sad reflection that retirement itself will doubtless remain a mere fantasy for those of us betrayed and destroyed by the ‘Brexit’ generation.) I certainly do not feel remotely prepared to tackle it yet. In that respect, I both take heart and become ever more fearful from Furtwängler’s decision no longer to perform it. Like Beethoven himself – and surely we ought to afford his view a little respect, Wellington’s Victory notwithstanding – Furtwängler thought it Beethoven’s single greatest work, yet considered its challenges too great for him or indeed anyone else ever to be able to realise. And if Furtwängler, surely the greatest recorded Beethovenian of all, thought so…

Furtwängler’s view has overwhelmingly, tragically, been proved correct. I cannot, of course, claim to know all recorded performances of the Missa solemnis, let alone all other performances. Of the recordings as such (as opposed to performances that have survived on recording) only Klemperer’s 1966 version for me really confronts its challenges head on and emerges with credit. (One can hardly say ‘surmounts’ them; no one surmounts Beethoven’s challenges, or if (s)he does, that is perhaps the most lamentable fate of all.) And, perhaps perversely, although I should like to think in some sense dialectically – well I would, wouldn’t I? – I had, before this performance from Christian Thielemann and Berlin forces, attended only one performance in the concert hall. True, they do not necessarily come along so very often, but nor are they so rare as that might imply. I had not wanted to risk a mediocre, let alone a poor, performance: bad enough in symphonic Beethoven – what is more soul-destroying than thinking ‘pointless’ and-or ‘meaningless’ to a performance of the Fifth Symphony? – but somehow even worse here, for it might end up sounding like what its detractors think it does. I had chosen my single performance well: Colin Davis, shortly before his death, and with mortality seemingly, even at the time, hanging over Beethoven’s grand reckoning not only with the Mass but with God Himself. It was a performance I shall never forget – and again, like Klemperer, that is part of the problem for whatever comes after. It may, it would seem, also be (re)listened to on YouTube, but I have never felt the desire to try – and doubtless to fail – to repeat an unrepeatable experience. (Indeed, although I have offered a link to the review, I do not yet even wish to re-read it.) And the thoughts it gave rise to, seemingly spanning the entirety of musical and theological history, or doubtless I flatter myself…

Apologies for having spent so long, relatively speaking, concerning my own thoughts, or attempts at thoughts, about the work rather than the performance. (Believe me, I could have gone on for much, much longer; I almost thought myself retired.) They seemed necessary, though, not even merely advisable, to explain how I heard Thielemann’s performance – or perhaps, to those who gained far more from it, how I did not hear it. Or perhaps I too was avoiding a confrontation. It seems somehow almost unforgivably banal to move to saying ‘it had much to admire, yet…’. And yet, that is what I must do; for, despite many very real virtues, the sheer excellence of all performing forces the greatest among them, I was left almost entirely cold. Was that another turn, as it were, of the Adornian dialectical screw? I thought I had truly grasped the work, however fleetingly, and then had not? Maybe a little, but not really, I think.

Thielemann clearly knew the work, or the notes, and what he wanted from it, or them. He was conducting from memory. Moreover, he clearly knew exactly how to get what he wanted from those uniformly excellent performers. Any criticisms I shall make are in no sense criticisms of them. One might have thought that a musician who, not unaggressively, positions himself as a standard bearer of the great German tradition would have been in a good position to communicate the mysteries of this work. There is, of course, no single tradition, though. And whilst I have in the past admired Thielemann’s Beethoven greatly – his recordings with the Philharmonia, for instance – his more recent Beethoven, still more so his Wagner, seems to have been filtered through a materialist conception that might work for Strauss, and often does work for him, magnificently, but which cannot really cope with the meaning(s) of works by Beethoven and Wagner. We can certainly applaud the need not to say the same thing over and over again, or indeed merely to imitate the past; but that does not mean that an alternative, simply by virtue of being an alternative, has any of the answers.

The full, warm sound of the Berlin Philharmonic at the opening of the Kyrie augured well: not entirely unlike Thielemann’s Philharmonia Beethoven; perhaps also with a certain kinship to the Klang of Leonard Bernstein’s Concertgebouw recording; not much at all in common with the sound of any of Herbert von Karajan’s intriguing multiple attempts at reckoning with the work (see, for instance, here and here), although perhaps at another level – deeper or shallower? perhaps both? – not so distant conceptually from Karajan’s approach. Militant authenticists would not have liked it, but who cares? And the bounds of the movement – perhaps the only one that has recognisable bounds – were well chosen; I was put in mind of an observation from Joseph Kerman to the effect that this was the only part of Beethoven’s setting that had no hyperbole. (I cannot recall his precise words, and do not have them here with me to check, so I hope that I shall be forgiven for distortion, misattribution, or even downright invention!) Moreover, whilst, from observing Thielemann, one might have feared an overly moulded performance, it did not – at least not here – sound like one. And if one had a problem with what it looked like, one could also, as with Bernstein, close one’s eyes. (Even Karajan did not, of course, do that for works with chorus when conducting them.) There was, moreover, a fine sense of a ‘natural’ – however constructed that might have been – tread to the movement’s progress. Beethoven, quite rightly, was not to be hurried; nor was he to be static. Individual soloists versus the ‘mass’ of the chorus sounded in balance, and dramatically rather than banally so. It did not ‘sound like’ Haydn, but perhaps still belonged in a similar conception to his. Beethoven as (sort of) Haydn? That is hardly unreasonable, especially here.

The rest of the Mass does not, of course, and rarely if ever did Thielemann seem quite to know – not that I think he was not trying – to portray, to dramatise that. The breakneck speed of the opening of the Gloria was surely an attempt, far from unreasonable, to do that – but what does reason, at least Enlightenment reason, have to do with this work? Superlative playing from the orchestra and superlative singing from the chorus impressed, as did the extraordinary clarity of what one heard: bassoons beneath the chorus, for instance. It ‘worked’, I think, but something was missing. The beating Larghetto heart of the movement arguably did not, Thielemann seemingly struggling to establish a basic pulse, although the woodwind solos predictably ravished in a materialist fashion. Even once the pulse had settled, though, it all sounded a little too glamorous. There was, though, a welcome sense of decision to follow: there can be no argument with either Beethoven or Whoever Stands Above Him; or alternatively, there can, but it will fail. Such good work, very sadly, was largely undone by a preposterously indulgent Luftpause before ‘in glora Dei Patris’. What might work – might – in Thielemann’s Meistersinger ‘Wach auf!’ does not work here; it came across as mere egotism. Just because you can do something, it does not follow that you should. Following that, perhaps not inappropriately in situ, came weirdly operatic ‘Amens’. Beethoven as Verdi? No thank you.

Still more is at stake in Beethoven’s Credo, both statement of and struggle to believe. Here, alas, there was far too little sense of struggle. Tension was built up admirably in the first section, very controlled, even controlling, but that is not to be disdained; we hardly want a free-for-all. It was, again, mightily impressive. ‘Et incarnatus est’ brought Palestrina, increasingly adorned, to the stage, not unlike an aural representation of a Gothic church, decorated by Rococo successors. Egotism once again, however, brought a bizarrely prolonged silence between the ‘Crucifixus’ and ‘Et resurrexit’ sections. Perhaps this is unfair, but it was almost as if Thielemann wanted to dare the audience not to fidget, or even to applaud. What followed was highly theatrical – one may argue about whether it should be, but it is not an outrageous conception – without ever conveying any real sense of theological, or other, meaning. Neutrality as opposed to neutralising tendencies doing batter with subjectivity in the material and its development? Beethoven as sewing pattern? Again, no thank you.

That tendency to draw out ‘preparations’ – not in a liturgical sense – was again to be heard in the Sanctus as we approached the ‘Pleni sunt coeli’ section. Alas, it sounded more like a trick of the trade than a reading or communication of the text. There was no gainsaying, though, the outstanding level of execution. Warmly cultivated playing from concertmaster, Daniel Stabrawa – I wish violinists would not stand as if concerto soloists for this – was greatly to be admired, but did this feel in context as if it represented, even embodied, the descent of the Holy Ghost? Oddly, the music of the ‘Benedictus’ section sounded closer than I could recall hearing before to Die Zauberflöte. Beethoven as Mozart? Well, we can argue about that.

Darkness, even if again of a somewhat materialist conception, rightly haunted the opening of the Agnus Dei. Franz-Josef Selig’s solo seemed to speak with something close to perfection of both that darkness and the humanity that might emerge de profundis. A comparison with Sarastro would be indicative, but only if it involved contrast too: there is nothing of a noble yet flawed character to the music here. (The flaws obviously, I hope, refer to Sarastro, not to Mozart!) Once more, although Thielemann often looked as if he were about to pull the music around, he did not do so unduly; indeed, the sternness with which he conducted the Berlin strings was greatly to be admired in terms of potential meaning as well as executive accomplishment. There was no doubt that we were all, worthless sinners, to be on our knees here. The longed for unambiguous major chord, when it came, was treated to what I thought of as ‘fleeting length’: not indulgent, now, but provocative in a better, productive sense. What never quite materialised, though, was the cosmic scale to the later sounds of this movement. It was as if we had returned to the world of the Kyrie; even the terror of war sounded as if heard a little too much from afar, or even as a near-visual, ‘beautiful’ representation.

I was not overwhelmed, then, either by this microcosm, or by Thielemann’s Missa cosmogony. I do not doubt, and certainly do not mean to call into question, that he had considered what he was doing. Perhaps it was just not for me. I am not sure, though, that it was for Beethoven – whatever we mean by that – either. Still, it made me think, if more afterwards than at the time. I was led to think even about what it meant not to have been made to think. And then I returned to Adorno, and with the unquestionable egotism of a mere fallen human being, to something I had written in my first book (on Wagner’s Ring), towards its close:

Adorno was quite justified to claim that serious consideration of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis – perhaps the most enduringly enigmatic musical work yet written – could only result in its Brechtian alienation, in rupturing ‘the aura of unfocused veneration protectively surrounding it’. One of the greatest problems with respect to the Ring is that such rupture has become well-nigh impossible. To be aware of this is only a beginning, but better than nothing. We should remain grateful that the enigma of the Ring pales besides that of Beethoven’s work. If we could understand why Beethoven set the Mass, we should, Adorno claimed, understand the Missa Solemnis. Understanding why Wagner wrote the Ring and beginning to understand the work itself suddenly seem less forbidding prospects.

Until, then, (impossible) retirement…

Levit - Beethoven, 30 January 2017

Wigmore Hall

 

Piano Sonata no.2 in A major, op.2 no.2

Piano Sonata no.7 in D major, op.10 no.3
Piano Sonata no.6 in F major, op.10 no.2
Piano Sonata no.18 in E-flat major, op.31 no.3

Igor Levit (piano)

 

I found myself torn. Should I actually have been attending the march to Downing Street against Donald Trump and his enabler, Theresa May? There is more than one way to resist, though: of that I am certain. Listen, for instance, to Furtwängler’s wartime recordings. (I have just been listening, on Schubert’s birthday, to the 1942 Great C major Symphony. The anger is still more palpable in Beethoven Ninth’s from the same year. And so, of course, is the power of Beethoven’s music to resist.) And whilst all great art, all great human endeavour, will have something to offer in that respect, Beethoven lays claim to a very special place. Sceptics can rail all they like, try to cut his music down to size, deny Beethoven’s art its heroism; they will never succeed. We know that a performance of Fidelio from Daniel Barenboim and young musicians, many of whom would now be denied entry to the United States, has something very important to tell us. Just as we know that Beethoven from the Palestine Youth Orchestra, two of its members cruelly denied ‘permission’ by an enthusiastic Trump ally to leave Gaza, will speak of a musical necessity of which we can barely conceive, yet in a sense need just as keenly. To hear Beethoven piano sonatas, then, from an artist whose steadfast opposition to fascism (click here, for instance, for his statement to a Brussels audience following Trump’s election) is not the least admirable of his humanist qualities, and to engage with that performance as an audience member in, I hope, an active rather than a passive sense, had its merits too.

 

We began in the eighteenth century, with the second of the thirty-two sonatas, the A major, op.2 no.2. The opening phrase sounded fresh, still, just about, of that world; the answering phrase already showed Beethoven flexing his muscles in the direction of things to come. Great care over articulation and phrasing contributed to the urgency of the performance: nothing was rushed; everything counted. Accents and sforzandi mattered in a sense far beyond ‘mere’ expression: their structural function and thus their meaning too seemed almost to speak of a world we might have thought opened up by Webern and his successors. The first movement’s development section offered proper intensification, as if taking after the symphonic Beethoven still to come, and the recapitulation proved as much a second development as a return, motivic working key here. That said, proportions still spoke, quite rightly, of Classical perfection. (A question I often set first-year undergraduates relates to whether we should consider Beethoven to be a Classical or a Romantic composer. The longer I think about it, the more difficult, yet necessary, a question it is. Should it prove to be question to which just a few of them return throughout their lives, that would make me happy indeed.) With hushed dignity, the Largo appassionato was constructed before our ears. Architecture came to the fore, without compromise to the quasi-vocal ornamentalism so typical of much early Beethoven. Alas, it took the most full-blooded tone for Igor Levit to mask, if only briefly, an all too zealous contribution from quadrophonic bronchial activists. The Scherzo was characterised by graceful insouciance, as if trying to recapture a Mozartian world that would ever remain just beyond it, tantalisingly so. Its trio, both in legato and vivid drama, seems also to speak of Mozart. If I have heard the finale more overtly loved – often loved to death, I fear – this performance intrigued in laying bare Beethoven’s musical processes. Not that it was short on drama, far from it, but it showed, in modernistic fashion, that those processes are not only its motor but perhaps even, at least in part, its subject matter. Tonal surprises registered, if anything, all the more strongly.

 

At the opening of the D major Sonata, op.10 no.2, we heard a related, yet unquestionably different, tonality. One might say the same of much else too, of course, but it was that indefinable ‘character’ of key – even if Beethoven might use D major differently somewhere else – that immediately struck me. A dizzying array of themes was thoroughly integrated in a performance that knew exactly where it was heading. It was very fast – Beethoven marks its ‘Presto’, after all – yet never too fast, never breathless. Rockets soared, especially in the development, yet their trail never lacked grace. Again, the sheer difference of the recapitulation registered strongly, thrillingly. There was no mistaking, even from the first bar, the Romantic gravity of the slow movement, quite distinct from anything we had yet heard; and yet, that vocal, quasi-operatic quality remained to be heard too, transformed, even transfigured. Imbued with a meaning that could never be reduced to words, Levit showed us that, if all Beethoven matters enormously, some matters still more. Even the starkest dynamic contrasts could not disrupt the musico-dramatic line; they strengthened it: perhaps there is a message there for us beyond the concert hall too. After that, the Menuetto sounded with charm; disruptions, or apparent disruptions, in the bass, showed a different variety of charm and more than a little Beethovenian humour. Both quizzical and furious, the finale burst forth as a riot of Haydnesque invention that could never have been written by Haydn. Beethoven had learned his lessons far too well to be mistaken for another. The particular integrative impulse was very much Beethoven’s own – and, of course, that of the pianist.

 

The first movement of op.10 no.2, in F major, sounded initially not so distant from it’s a major counterpart in approach. The devil, or perhaps the angel, proved to be in the detail. Beethoven’s good nature shone through: more than good nature, profound humanity. Levit conveyed a fine sense of deep mystery to the development, which proved ‘surprising’, even if one flattered oneself one knew it. There was protean mystery to the central Allegretto too. Heard as if in a single breath, it revealed such an array of incident when one truly listened – and how could one not? The Presto finale was despatched with a virtuosity permitting of both fury and levity (no pun intended). Counterpoint was relished, proving generative of a well-nigh neo-Mozartian host of ‘characters’ plying their trade upon our aural stage.

 

With the E-flat major Sonata, op.31 no.3, we found ourselves in a very different world. What a work this is; how much more often we ought to hear it! The tonal centre emerged gracefully, yet not too easily, from that extraordinary first-movement introduction. (It is as much a joy to play as to hear!) And yet, despite the differences in scale, maturity, and so much else, there was again a sense of a host of characters treading the aural boards before us, Beethoven’s neo-Mozartian flirtations now at greater distance and perhaps even possessed of still greater affection. Rhythm, harmony, and melody formed an indissoluble whole, conveyed with exquisite voicing that yet never remotely seemed an end in itself. Above all, quite rightly, this was a drama. The second movement is, quite frankly, a bastard to play, but you would never have known it from this performance, in which lightness of touch and great boldness were revealed as two sides of the same coin. It was more boisterous than Mendelssohn but perhaps gestured more than a little in his direction. That sense of longing for an age to which Beethoven – perhaps all of us – would like to return, yet could not, imbued the third movement, played with tender luxuriance. All too often it is rushed, but not here, the richness of Beethoven’s harmonies present for all to hear. A skittish contrast was announced with the finale, whose mood changes proved just as protean as anything in the preceding sonata. It was every inch a finale, every inch a Beethoven finale: just what was required.


To quote Hans Werner Henze, in an article entitled 'Does Music have to be Political?': 'Beethoven regarded his whole enterprise as a contribution to human progress.' Let us do so too.

Berlin Festtage (1) - Schütz/VPO/Barenboim - Boulez and Schubert

Philharmonie

Boulez – Livre pour cordes

Mémoriale
Originel
Schubert – Symphony no.9 in C major, ‘Great’, D 944

Karl-Heinz Schütz (flute)

Christina Bauer, Noid Haberl (electronics)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

 

No encore, although the audience would clearly have liked one; more to the point, there was a non-advertised late addition to the programme at the beginning. Daniel Barenboim came to the podium and announced that the concert would begin with the Air from Bach’s Orchestral Suite in D major, BWV 1068. Beautiful without affectation, it was a more eloquent mark of respect to those who had lost their lives in the German Wings aeroplane crash than any words. It was not a performance to be ‘reviewed’, but it should be noted.

 

The Vienna Philharmonic strings then launched more or less immediately – though not without unwanted applause, dealt with admirably by Barenboim – into Boulez’s Livre pour cordes. Barenboim’s reading proved, like his Wagner and much else, both spacious and keenly dramatic. I was struck how close the music sounded at times to Bartók. The players, coaxed into playing ‘New Music’, offered crucial subtlety in dynamic gradation and transition; to give an example, the eight double basses’ pizzicato playing was not only admirable in its unanimity but in its acceleration of impetus, driving the music forward just as it might in Beethoven. The piece emerged almost as if a tone poem (of ‘absolute music’).

Mémoriale benefited from another performance of what one might call warm precision: very much akin with much of Boulez’s own later conducting work. Perfect coordination between the magnificent flautist, Karl-Heinz Schütz, and the Vienna strings – interplay and counterpoint, echoes and collision – led us into a beguiling labyrinth indeed. The subtle yet crucial contribution of the horns should also be noted, not least at the end, fading exquisitely into nothingness. Those horns – and their players, or their instruments, according to one’s understanding! – then moved to the other side of the stage, quickly joined by other wind instruments. Two more flautists stood on either side, awaiting the return of Schütz and Barenboim for Originel. But first, Barenboim said a few words, explaining that we should now hear the same material in another Besetzung, referring to Boulez’s love for complexity and kinship both with Mahler and the orchestral Notations. (Difficult to argue with any of that!) The pairing proved genuinely rewarding, both for the mind and the senses. From the presence of clarinets at the opening, soon joined by electronics (Christina Bauer and Noid Haberl, developed and realised at IRCAM), and then the first of the two additional flute Kinder (Barenboim’s term), similarity and difference not only presented themselves but ravished. I wished I could have heard it all again, and that we might have heard any number of other potential versions.

Whilst the connection with Schubert was not overt, the care that Barenboim took to make ‘New’ Music classical and ‘old’ music new was once again clear; so was the superlative playing of the VPO. The introduction to the first movement sounded simply glorious, but more than that, it proved in spirit quite the most Furtwänglerian account I have heard in concert. There was, needless to say, none of that absurd ‘same tempo as the exposition’ nonsense. This was an experience that was mystical in the best sense. The Vienna horns, the oboe, pretty much everything – all sounded to die for. Even the depth of the violas’ sound could not help but strike, could not help but draw one in to the incipient, inexorable drama. But there was no more wallowing in beauty for its own sake than there had been in Boulez. Dark menace was a hallmark of the strings throughout the movement, always in alliance with harmonic motion; indeed, as time went on, the ghost of Klemperer sounded almost as present as that of Furtwängler, just as in much of Barenboim’s recent Beethoven. And indeed there was an almost Beethovenian purpose to the course of the movement, tension between and beneath the notes inescapable. What struck me at the end of the coda was not ‘heavenly length’ but apparent concision.

The Andante con moto was perfectly judged, both parts of the tempo marking honoured. If the oboe solo was undoubtedly exquisite, so were contributions from all of the woodwind. So too was the string playing, sounding new in the light of the Boulez works. Barenboim’s build up to the great climax was both Brucknerian and not, never uncharacteristic. I was left feeling bereft and yet, in the light of the cellos’ song in aftershock, also (potentially) reconciled. The Scherzo’s opening material was played with rustic swagger: more than the odd reminiscence of Haydn. Line, orchestral balance, and, not least, grace were equal partners in crime here. Grace certainly suffused the lovely, yet never too lovely, Trio. It relaxed – out of symphonic necessity. And yet, the harmony ever pushed us forward. There could be no arguing with the heft of the finale, nor, more importantly, with its tension and release. This was a finale truly worthy of the name. It was not only that its thrills were both visceral and intellectual; the performance showed that the two could not be separated. Likewise motivic life in inner parts and the grinding harmonic motion in the bass. If there has been a greater performance of this symphony since Colin Davis in Dresden, maybe even since Karl Böhm, I have not heard it.

 

Today's prize for shoddy, ignorant music journalism goes to...

... Philip Oltermann of The Guardian. (It is actually a report dated 31 July, but since we are dealing with journalism, what's a fact or two between friends?) A Twitter friend brought this to my attention, and it is quite staggering, even by the normal standards, clearly written by someone who knows nothing about Wagner, Bayreuth, music, nor indeed, it would seem, anything about anything else.













'Long considered the embodiment of German high culture...'
By whom, and in what sense? I cannot recall having heard anyone speak of it in such terms, insofar as those terms might be considered meaningful.

'Bayreuth's opera festival is becoming more notorious for its scandals than its music...'
'Becoming'? Do you know anything about the history of the Festival? Have you perhaps heard of the Third Reich, of Winifred Wagner, or indeed of a host of controversial stagings, at the very least from Wieland Wagner onwards?

'Director Frank Castorf's radically deconstructed six-hour production of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung...'
Six-hour production?! As another Twitter friend commented, that is 'radically deconstructed' indeed. It certainly took longer when I was there last week.

'Director Frank Castorf's radically deconstructed six-hour production of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung was met with boos and jeers when it premiered at Bayreuth last year...'
So now you are talking about something that happened last year? In what sense is this conceivably a news item?

'Castorf, an experimental east German director drafted in after the film directors Lars von Trier and Wim Wenders declined invitations...'
Well, only in the sense that he was 'drafted in' after the death of Winifred Wagner or indeed after the death of Richard Wagner. Lars von Trier was due to direct the previous 'Ring' at Bayreuth.


That is quite enough for now. I really cannot be bothered with the rest: poorly digested, if at all, from other reports... (There is, though, serious competition from an error-laden, almost comically reactionary piece - 'horrible modern-dress concepts that have become the bane of every opera lover's existence' etc. - in The Daily Telegraph on the Munich Opera Festival, should you really wish to seek it out.)


Alternatively, you might spend your time more wisely listening to this:

Ending Don Giovanni

 

 

Kasper Holten’s new Royal Opera production of Don Giovanni has caused quite a stir. I cannot comment, since I have not seen it, and shall not do so until 14^th. However, one feature I have gleaned from reports – and I should stress that this is second-hand – relates to the ending. Apparently, the opening of the final scene is cut, so that we only hear the final ‘moral’. A journalist claimed earlier today that Mozart had done the same in 1788. Quite how he knew is unclear. It is clearly a sign that investigative journalism is anything but dead, since I am unaware of any Mozart scholar being party to the details of what precisely was performed at those Vienna performances. In fact, of course, we do not know – and that is in many ways more interesting. Mozart may have omitted the final scene completely, or he may not. The 1788 Vienna libretto does not include it, though a Vienna score (not an autograph) does. Moreover, there was also the possibility of a cut within the scena ultima, running from ‘Ah! certo è l’ombra che m’incontrò!’ to ‘Resti dunque quel birbon’; there are four ‘new’ bars, marked Andante, to facilitate that transition. It does not sound as though that is what happened at Covent Garden; even if it were, the intriguing reality remains that we do not know what Mozart (and Da Ponte) did in Vienna, so why claim otherwise? As Julian Rushton points out in his Cambridge Opera Handbook to the work, it may well be the case that different ways of ending the opera were tried out.
 

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with doing so now, though it seems to me that one ought to have good reason. Another ‘version’ about which we know frustratingly, yet intriguingly, little comes from 1850: Wagner’s lost Zurich revision. He describes it as a Bearbeitung in a letter from early that year to Theodor Uhlig, and speaks of having 'carefully nuanced' (sorgfältig nüancirt) the orchestra, made a new translation, and various other changes, which, without a score, it is not always easy fully to understand. That is, of course, if we take what he has to say not only at face value - there is no particular reason we should not - but also as his final thoughts on a work he would conduct eight months later. In any case, Wagner ends that particularly discussion with the playful, 'Nun genug von dieser Flickarbeit!' ('Now, enough of this patchwork maintenance!') There are extant, tantalisingly, a fragment, discovered in the late 1990s, comprising nine bars of off-stage trumpet cues, also dialogue cues and another fragment of just two bars held by the University of Leipzig. Chris Walton, one of the few to have considered this material, speculates that Wagner’s  revisions were less radical than might have been implied, perhaps exaggerated as part of a marketing ploy. At present, however, we might with equal justification speculate otherwise. We simply do not know. Perhaps, however, one day an imaginative and/or foolhardy composer might even dare to enter the mediated realm of reimagining Wagner’s reimagining – aided by a sympathetic director and cast.

 

For it is, of course, true that, for all our latter day reverence for the musico-dramatic work concept, Don Giovanni has experienced a chequered history in that respect. Indeed, more often than not conductors and/or directors even today will opt for a conflation of Mozart’s versions for Prague and Vienna: largely, one fears, a matter of bowing to singers’ – and audiences’ – demands for extra arias rather than out of genuine dramatic conviction. It is, of course, a hard pill to swallow, to lose one of Donna Elvira’s arias and one of Don Ottavio’s; the Vienna duet between Zerlina and Leporello is generally considered no great loss. However, there has yet to be mounted a dramatic, as opposed to pragmatic, justification for offering the now commonplace succession of arias in the second act. (I might, for instance, hazard a possible explanation, as Devil’s Advocate, in the guise of heightening the elements of opera seria display, striking a blow against Wagnerian notions of dramatic cohesion and continuity, but that case remains to be made.)

 

More extreme measures, however, were taken in the more distant past. Berlioz, writing of an 1834 Paris staging, was moved to lament:

It is a pity that it was considered necessary to take various dances, extended, lopped off, reordered, and orchestrated according to the method which seems to me so inimical to musical sense and the interests of art, from other works of Mozart, and insert them into Don Giovanni; without these additions the absolutely pure style of this sublime score, boldly breaking the public habits of the last eight or ten years, might have completed this important revolution.

Moreover, a reference to the Stone Guest scene, ‘the trombones, which have been silent for some time,’ suggests that, in contravention of the score, they had been heard earlier – though, given Mozart’s reorchestrations of Handel, dismay might be misplaced.

 

There persisted, furthermore, the Romantic tradition of omitting the final scene – which, as we have seen, may or may not have some warrant in Mozart’s practice in 1788. For the Mozart year of 1906, Mahler in Vienna not only altered some of the orchestration, made cuts both of complete arias and ensembles and also within certain numbers, and interpolated the finale to Mozart’s Divertimento in B-flat major, KV 287/271h. In a practice that was already being questioned, he and his director, Alfred Roller – the latter, of course, also a crucial figure in the history of Wagner staging – concluded with Don Giovanni’s descent into Hell. Whereas to many modern audiences, and certainly to me, the final sextet introduces a note of bracing, almost Brechtian alienation, framing the action in a sense that both harks back to more ancient traditions as well as looking forwards beyond Romanticism, there was for Mahler and Roller nothing more to say at this point, notwithstanding the oddness of what therefore became the final cadence. However, as Henry-Louis de La Grange notes, even in that fin-de-siècle context, many other recent productions of Don Giovanni had included it, notably that given by Ernst von Possart in Munich. (Possart was the actor for whom Strauss wrote his 1897 melodrama, Enoch Arden.)

 

The ‘tradition’ seemed to have died out; Furtwängler, whom, amongst post-war conductors, some might have suspected of harbouring such tendencies, certainly did not continue it. (Much to his credit, I am tempted to say.) And then, Claus Guth staged the work as part of a Da Ponte trilogy for the Salzburg Festival, Don Giovanni first seen in 2008 – a little more than a century after Mahler, and thus almost as distant from him as he was from Mozart – and revived in 2010. (Note the transition from speaking of Mahler’s or Furtwängler’s Don Giovanni to the director’s.) The premise, as revealed in a brief programme discussion, was that:

Mozart tried to deal with all of our lives in the three hours he had for this opera. But what if he managed to compress everything that moves and occupies us into this framework? We must die. What do we do with our lifetime? Do we conform and subordinate ourselves, do we break out, do we try to fit in or break loose, cut our ties?

Interesting enough so far, but the problem was that Guth’s realisation failed to live up to the promise. What it boiled down to on stage seemed closer to a reality television programme: how would someone with three hours left to live decide to spend those three hours? By taking drugs and trying – unsuccessfully – to have sex with a good few women in a forest, all with the help of a slightly subordinate friend. I say ‘slightly subordinate’, since it was not at all clear what the social relationship between the protagonists might be. Blithely casting aside distinctions of order was one thing, but like many directors, Guth did not provide an adequate substitute.

 

The familiar conflation of the score was employed, barring the Leporello and Zerlina duet. (It seems had been included in 2008, then cut in 2010, when I saw the production.) I found myself quite unprepared for the absence of the final scene, not having been made aware beforehand. Yes, expectations were confounded, which can sometimes be a good thing in itself, and yes, of course there was the Romantic-Mahlerian tradition to which to appeal. In context, however, the feeling of straightforward incompletion was jarring rather than fruitful. It was difficult to avoid the suspicion that Guth had simply misunderstood the nature of the sextet. Its alienation effect might have rendered both work and production more interesting; without it, we veered dangerously close to melodrama, especially odd given the general tone of the production. The problem was not the decision as such as its placing and indeed the director’s reasoning. Guth claimed that Mozart was ‘bowing to convention’, yet throughout the work Mozart had come close to destroying any such concept; the finale could be understood to be still more radical in this context, inevitably to us suggesting Stravinsky and beyond: the neo-Classicism of The Rake’s Progress or at least Neue Sachlichkeit.

 

Oliver Knussen understands this very well in his fantasy opera (1984-5, revised 1999), Higglety Pigglety Pop! Both Higglety and Don Giovanni end 'outside' their dramas, in bright if tarnished D major – and the Mother Goose World Theatre surely pays tribute to Stravinsky’s work too. The repetitions of Higglety’s closing-scene gala performance, no mere convention but the time-honoured tradition of a play within a play, unsettle as they should. What do they mean? When will they stop? That is a more radical reimagining than simply not knowing how to conclude.

 

Tellingly, Mozart’s score in performance begged for completion. It did not chillingly come to a halt, after Wozzeck; it seemed rather simply to stop, awkwardly. Although it was interesting, then, to hear an accidental revival of this venerable ‘version’, in practice, however, the inappropriate context served principally to confirm discrediting of the tradition. Here was an instructive case of a director who seemed to have too little knowledge of, or indeed interest in, the score; ‘respect’ for the work would have expanded rather than lessened performative options.

 

Let us see then, what happens at the Royal Opera House…

For Furtwängler's birthday and Gluck's tercentenary

What dramatic tension from the Overture onwards! No mere curtain-raiser, but as Gluck/Calzabigi demanded in the Preface to Alceste, an integral part of the drama. And then the noble, heartrending simplicity of the obsequies, already looking towards Les Troyens...

Happy Birthday, Richard!

Many, myself included, have expended large numbers of words; I have no doubt that we shall continue to do so. However, the ultimate riddle remains encapulated not just in that chord, but in this work. Nietzsche rightly said he would only touch it with gloves. Wagner himself worried in writing to Mathilde Wesendonck that only poor performaces would save him, and us: 'Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad, – I cannot imagine it otherwise.’ This may only be the Prelude to the first act, but it remains a rare instance of a 'perfectly good' perfomance, with all that entails:

R.I.P. Elisabeth Furtwängler (1910-2013)

Daniel Barenboim must now be one of our few remaining links with the greatest conductor of the twentieth century.

Perfection...

... which is 'all' Mozart needs, and which he so rarely receives:

Looking forward to Parsifal at Bayreuth (V)

But I am also clear in my own mind why I can even feel greater fellow-suffering for lower natures than for higher ones. A higher nature is what it is precisely because it has been raised by its own suffering to the heights of resignation, or else has within it – and cultivates – the capacity for such a development. Such a nature is extremely close to mine, is indeed similar to it, and with it I attain to fellow-joy. That is why, basically, I feel less fellow-suffering for people than for animals. For I can see that the latter are totally denied the capacity to rise above suffering, and to achieve a state of resignation and deep, divine calm. And so, in the event of their suffering, as happens when they are tormented, all I see – with a sense of my own tormented despair – is their absolute, redemption-less suffering without any higher purpose, their only release being death which confirms my belief that it would have been better for them never to have entered upon life. And so, if this suffering can have a purpose, it is simply to awaken a sense of fellow-suffering in man, who thereby absorbs the animal’s defective existence, and becomes the redeemer of the world by recognising the error of all existence. (This meaning will one day become clearer to you from the Good Friday morning scene in the third act of Parzifal.)

(Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck, 1 October 1858)

Prom 12: WEDO/Barenboim (3) - Beethoven and Boulez, 23 July 2012

Royal Albert Hall

Beethoven – Symphony no.6 in F major, op.68, ‘Pastoral’
Boulez – memoriale (...explosante-fixe... originel)
Boulez – Messagesquisse
Beethoven – Symphony no.5 in C minor, op.67

Guy Eshed (flute)
Hassan Moataz El Molla (cello)
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)


The Barenboim/West-Eastern Divan Orchestra Beethoven-Boulez series goes from strength to strength. There will doubtless be someone who begs to differ, but I find it difficult to imagine that anyone in the Royal Albert Hall could have failed to register this as a truly great musical experience – and more than or equal to that, a great experience of the human spirit. Beethoven seems well-nigh impossible for our age to comprehend, or at least to express, which is why we need him all the more. Alas, and not solely on account of the ‘period’ revolution, though that has a great deal to answer for, too many musicians – one would be too many! – seem to have lost any conception of what is required. Daniel Barenboim has not; nor has his inspirational band of young musicians.

There is never a single, ‘correct’ tempo for a piece – though there are of course exceptional works such as Stockhausen’s Gruppen which depend upon intricate tempo relationships – any more than there is a single, ‘correct’ interpretation of a musical work. That said, Barenboim’s account of the first movement of the Pastoral Symphony, indeed of the symphony as a whole, sounded just right. I dread to think at what breakneck speed our authenticist friends would harry Beethoven here, still more how they would refuse to let the music breathe. Whilst I never have the slightest idea, nor interest, in timings as such, Barenboim sounded to me very much in what once would have been the mainstream. Karl Böhm, in his mangificent Vienna Philharmonic recording, might have been a little slower; Carlos Kleiber was probably quicker. The crucial thing was that harmonic rhythm was understood and communicated. And what a cultivated sound the Divan offered; at times, this almost seemed as if it were a Beethoven string quartet writ large. It should go without saying that the development section sounded developmental and that the recapitulation offered a sense of return; alas, in the light of so many recent performances, it is worthy of note – and is of course far easier said than done. The slow movement was utterly beguiling yet equally underpinned by inexorable forward momentum. There is nothing worse here – and this has nothing to do with metronome markings – than the music overstaying its welcome. I almost wished to hear it again.   It now seems so obvious, but I do not think I had previously appreciated how much Beethoven’s ‘tone-painting’ here actually owes to the rather different example of Mozart’s divertimenti. Trust a great Mozartian such as Barenboim to highlight the connection, which could never have been achieved, however, without the ravishing playing of his musicians. The scherzo’s rusticity looked back to Haydn and forward to countless Romantics; above all, it sang and stomped with Beethovenian vigour, which is never, as Barenboim understands, something to be applied from without, but which must come from the telos of the music. Though the storm also sacked nothing either in vigour, its rigour was of a similarly musical nature. By all means imagine whatever country scenes you wish in your head; the music and its performance stand and fall upon their own strengths. Warmth, fulfilment, thanksgiving: all are certainly terms one might employ in discussion of the finale, but again, a Klemperer-like inevitability underpinned their expression or suggestion.

Guy Eshed was the soloist for the ensemble performance that followed. Boulez’s memoriale, at least in this context, provided another, perhaps more surprising, link to the Mozartian divertimento tradition, though anyone who knows the composer’s relatively recent recording of the Gran Partita will know not to be very surprised. This was delectable playing from all concerned, and if the piece itself would prove not only memorial but new beginning (on the path to ...explosante-fixe...), here it offered, if not light relief, then delicious contrast.  Just as in a previous Proms performance from these musicians, Boulezian open-endedness was an abiding impression, an oblique response perhaps to Beethovenian finality?

Messaagesquisse followed: an exciting prospect, given the fine performance I had heard Hassan Moataz El Molla and colleagues from the WEDO give, under Barenboim’s direction, in Berlin a couple of years ago, for the composer’s eighty-fifth birthday. Unfortunately, and I put it mildly, the hall had neglected to inform at least a good number of us – it seems that there were inserts in some programmes, though not others, and no announcement was made – that the interval would come after rather than before the performance. Along with many around me, I sauntered outside for a breath of fresh air, was informed by an usher that the interval would last for twenty minutes – yes, I even asked! – only to find upon my return to the hall, the cellist receiving applause from a significantly reduced audience. Why ever was an announcement not made and/or a notice displayed, and why ever did the staff not inform those of us leaving? Still, it was heart-warming to note on returning home a little postscript to the relevant page on the Proms website: ‘Please note: For technical reasons, it has been necessary to move the position of tonight's interval, which will now occur after Pierre Boulez's Messagesquisse.’ I hope that those listeners at home who would otherwise have reached for the kettle would not have suffered the same fate as many of us paying customers in the hall. Here, below, is a video clip of the Berlin performance I heard.

After the interval proper came Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. I had doubtless been unlucky, but I had never heard in the concert hall a performance I thought worthy of the work, or indeed of the great recorded performances of the past. Now, for the first time, I did. Interestingly, given that a reader quizzed me only a day or so ago about why I rarely mentioned Klemperer’s influence upon Barenboim, I felt that more strongly than I had usually done in the first movement. No one would be able to recreate the very specific circumstances of desperation and defiance to be heard in Furtwängler’s legendary 1943 recording.

Barenboim wisely did not try. But there was to be heard throughout this still incredibly concise movement – Webern must surely have loved it! – something of the implacability, the inexorability, the impossibility of compromise, almost synonymous with Klemperer, one of Barenboim’s greatest mentors. The opening bars knocked one for six, yet did not stand out like a sore thumb, nor indeed at all; they opened, and the music, in the best sense rather than that more generally current, never relented. There was defiance too in the slow movement, its processional status – another nod, or more, to the French Revolution – readily apparent, readily felt. If there were repose at all, it was of the most limited order. Tonal restlessness continually undermined any such temptations, for the battle was far from won. The scherzo offered plenty of opportunity, well taken, for Barenboim’s musicians to shine: one could sense, even without seeing, how well they had been taught to listen to each other. Yet of course this was not a case simply of chamber music on a grander scale – a problem with some of Claudio Abbado’s more recent performances, when it comes to music for which the idea simply is not apposite – for it required, and received, the surety of Barenboim’s guiding hand. (Special mention must be made of the double basses in the trio, digging so deep, so rich, that there could be no doubt that this music meant something, even if that something could never be put into words.) The transition from the ghostly reprise of the scherzo – here, rightly played above all with musical meaning rather than as a strange ‘effect’ – into the finale is surely one of the most extraordinary in all music. Barenboim and the orchestra showed that it need not fall flat in performance, as so often it does; indeed, they showed that Beethoven can still storm, perhaps open, the portals of heaven. In a mediocre performance, the predominance of tonic and dominant harmony can almost become tedious. On this occasion, there was no doubting the optimistic, humanistic blazing of glory that Beethoven offers and our age more often than not seems able only to decline, or at least to snipe at. Having the piccolo player stand looked a little odd, but it enabled us to hear her part properly, and to appreciate what miniature invention lies therein. For the coda acted, as it must, as a release for all the tension built up throughout the symphony. We might still have questions at the end; our historical predicament doubtless makes it inevitable. Yet somehow, this music can still, just, offer us hope. I have no idea how this performance will sound as a recorded memento in the cold light of day. But who needs the cold light of day? Certainly not Beethoven.