Schoenberg, Freud, and Psychoanalysis: Lecture at the Freud Museum

Self-portrait, signed and dated May 1918, courtesy of the Arnold Schoenberg Center

Last month, I gave a lecture at the Freud Museum on 'Schoenberg, Freud, and Psychoanalysis'. It is now available to be downloaded (for free) as a podcast here or listened to online here. (In the case of the latter 'here': on the right hand of the page, no.4.) There are  three other lectures available from the museum's day of events on Music and Psychoanalysis: on Don Giovanni, Thomas Mann, and Tippett.


And here are two recordings of the first work I discuss, Erwartung. I find the second preferably recorded and, in many respects, performed. However the, first not only has Jessye Norman but subtitles too.

Chamber version of Schoenberg's 'Lied der Waldtaube': Norman/EIC/Boulez

Performances of Gurrelieder are, for obvious reasons, infrequent. It remains one of the great 'special occasion' works, more so even than Mahler's Eighth Symphony. (Oddly, I have never heard a bad performance of Schoenberg's early masterwork, whereas I have heard far too many pointless accounts of the so-called 'Symphony of a Thousand', one very recently indeed.) It is not forbidding in the way that Moses und Aron is (or at least people who do not listen to it fear that it might be); it is simply a huge undertaking. Yet I have never knowingly met a listener who did not fall in love with Gurrelieder. Sincerity is never enough, of course, but the greatness of Schoenberg as a human being as well as a musician shines through the pages of his vast cantata. It is, then,  all the more bewildering that the chamber version of the 'Song of the Wood-dove' is not performed every other night by ensemble and soprano. Nothing will ever replace the luxurious full orchestral version, but if Schoenberg's ideas on instrumentation progressed throughout his work on the original - one of the many fascinating voyages one takes in a performance - they had done all the more so by 1922, the time of that unaccountably neglected masterpiece, the Serenade, op.24. Here are Jessye Norman, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and Pierre Boulez, in a recording I have loved since I first heard it.





Those who know the full work will be aware of the context for subtly increasing terror; those who do not should rectify that state of affairs as a matter of urgency... And soloists, ensembles, conductors, please permit us to hear in the flesh this and many other of the composer's works. Gurrelieder may never be performed every day, but Schoenberg should be.

Daniel Barenboim - Chopin at Tate Modern

Turbine Hall, Tate Modern

This is not intended in any real sense as a review but just as a brief note concerning Daniel Barenboim's impromptu concert - at least that is very much how it has been spun, and there is no obvious reason to believe otherwise - at Tate Modern. Announced yesterday, we were encouraged to register online for tickets; I was notified yesterday evening that I should have a seat on the Turbine Hall Bridge. I have no idea how many were in the audience, but it was certainly a goodly number, with many below watching on a screen. Barenboim was gracious - and astute - enough to greet them first, before coming up to the bridge, and acknowledged their presence throughout, for which he was rewarded with ecstatic applause. Whatever else one might say about him, he has star quality, the same quality I first noticed as an undergraduate at Jesus College, Cambridge, when Jessye Norman came to my college chapel to give a private recital to mark the college's quincentenary. She almost only had to enter the nave to have a very special effect upon one; Barenboim's charm ensured that he held the audience in the palm of his hand, and would have done so even had he only spoken, without playing a single note. And thank goodness he made a plea for music education from the kindergarten onwards, which, as he so rightly pointed out, would solve all further music funding problems as a matter of course. Our so-called Secretary of State for Culture should have been made to listen to him and to copy out his words a hundred times.

In between his words - and Barenboim acknowledged that he would much rather be talked about for what he played than what he said - we heard a number of items by Chopin. I felt a little sorry for the string quintet made up of fine musicians from the Staatskapelle Berlin. Their role was solely to play in the chamber reduction of the slow movement from Chopin's First Piano Concerto. That is not exactly music that shows string players to their greatest advantage, and the acoustic proved an enemy too. Indeed, the acoustic played such tricks that one might have thought the piano amplified. So far as I could tell, it was a good performance; Barenboim certainly shaped the music well and maintained the composer's quasi-vocal lines. To be sure, I suggest that we wait for the forthcoming recording with the full orchestra. The D-flat Nocturne, op.27 no.2 received a spellbinding reading, twists and turns navigated and relished, yet with no loss to the overall line. A brace of waltzes provided contrast: the 'Minute' Waltz, which was enjoyable enough but is far from my favourite Chopin, and a truly searching, ruminative account of the A minor Waltz. I could have heard that again and again... Finally, Barenboim presented an equally compelling reading of the Barcarolle, possessed of great cumulative power but equally fine attention to its detail and, above all, to its bewitching charm.

Below is a relatively recent (2009, Copenhagen) Barenboim performance of the Nocturne: