(This essay was originally published as a programme note for the Salzburg Festival, 2015, for a concert given by members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and Daniel Barenboim. How I wish I had gone, rather than suffering Claus Guth's Fidelio!)
RICHARD
WAGNER • Siegfried-Idyll for Chamber Orchestra, WWV 103
ARNOLD
SCHOENBERG • Chamber Symphony No. 1 in E for 15 Solo Instruments, Op. 9PIERRE BOULEZ • sur Incises (1996/1998/2006) pour 3 pianos, 3 harpes et 3 percussions-claviers
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| Gwyneth Jones and Peter Hofmann in the 'Centenary' Ring, conducted by Boulez |
Wagner-Schoenberg-Boulez:
it is a teleology worthy of any of those three, highly teleologically-minded
composers. Both Wagner and Schoenberg are composers who have featured heavily
in Pierre Boulez’s conducting, compositional, and polemical life; all three are
crucial figures to Daniel Barenboim too, and indeed to the West-Eastern Divan
Orchestra. In this programme, however, we can hear not only inspiration but
also the need to go beyond, even to disavow. ‘Schoenberg est mort,’ was
Boulez’s celebrated, if, in all but the most literal sense, premature claim in
1951. Parricide, though, has long been a guiding principle of the Western
‘classical’ tradition.
Wagner
had declared both his lineage in Beethoven’s example and the necessity of its
overcoming by positing his music dramas as the successors, perhaps even the
only successors, to the symphonies of his revered predecessor. An early, C
major Symphony (1832), is a better work than detractors, or mediocre
performances, permit, but is ultimately too imitative to stand entirely on its
own two feet. There is also a fragmentary E major Symphony from two years later,
and there are various sonata-form works for piano. The Siegfried-Idyll, however, remains in a different class. Moreover,
for all Wagner’s ongoing worship of Beethoven, it is not an especially
Beethovenian, or even sonata-principled work – and is probably all the stronger
for that.
Thematic material is taken from the
final scene of the third act of Siegfried,
often considered the ‘scherzo’ – Beethovenian terms die hard – of the Ring. Composed in late 1870, the Tribschen Idyll with Fidi – the present
title seems not to have been used until 1877, coined for a performance in
Meiningen – is subtitled, on the autograph score, ‘Birdsong and Orange Sunrise,
presented as a Symphonic Birthday Greeting to his Cosima by her Richard, 1870’.
Which is what happened on Christmas Day, in gratitude, as a short poem makes
clear, for the birth of Siegfried Wagner the previous year. Beethovenian
dialectics are largely eschewed in favour of a formal conception of development
rooted in Wagner’s own musico-dramatic ‘endless melody’, albeit without words.
If anything, it is Liszt’s symphonic poems – Liszt being Cosima’s father – that
come to mind as progenitors, a poetic ‘idea’ made manifest in music.
Not only does this
lullaby of peace, joy and world-inheritance, to employ conventional leitmotif
references from the opera, present a (hopeless) spur to our imagination with
respect to the post-Parsifal
‘symphonies’ Wagner often envisaged, yet was never granted time to write. It
also shows how Wagner’s mature compositional method could, despite the claims
of detractors and some admirers alike, adapt and even renew
later-nineteenth-century symphonic form. Carl Dahlhaus, writing of
Wagner’s music dramas, admirably described the composer’s leitmotif technique
as ‘the binding together of a music drama through a dense web of motivic
connections from within’. Such, in place of Beethoven’s symphonic
goal-orientation, viewed by many modernists with suspicion, offered the
prospect, subtly realised here, of instrumental music founded upon similar
principles. Indeed, a gradual, if far from complete loosening of association
between concrete objects and motifs in the music dramas – the Ring the high water-mark, Tristan and Parsifal freer in association – had already done part of Wagner’s
work for him. Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg would be two of his, and
Liszt’s, most important successors. Moreover, what Schoenberg would analyse in
earlier music, particularly but far from exclusively that of Brahms, as
‘developing variation’ is certainly present in Wagner’s expansion – prophetic
also for Boulez’s technique of ‘proliferation’ – of his opening motivic
material.
Liszt, Wagner,
Strauss, and Brahms certainly vie, most productively, for attention in
Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony, one of the composer’s sunniest, indeed
life-affirming works. It follows the sonata-form example of Liszt’s Sonata in B
minor for piano, radically integrating the traditional multi-movement
sonata/symphony structure – Sonata Allegro-Scherzo-Slow Movement-Finale – into
the traditional structure of a single sonata-form movement:
Exposition-Development-Recapitulation. Another important predecessor is Schubert’s
Wanderer Fantasy, which Liszt edited,
re-wrote, and transcribed (both for piano and orchestra, and for two pianos).
Equally important as such formal considerations, which undoubtedly help account
for its exhilarating concision, are instrumentation and harmony. In the more
commonly-played original version for fifteen solo instruments – Schoenberg
would later arrange the work for full orchestra, as Wagner had intended to do
with his Idyll – there is a
significant shift away from the string-saturated, or at least string-founded,
textures of the Romantic symphony (Brahms) or late Romantic symphonic poem
(Strauss). At the same time, that technique of developing variation, which
Schoenberg avowedly derived from Brahms, but which was also present in his
Wagnerian inheritance, and an almost-but-not-quite Expressionist tinge upon
Strauss’s harmonies contributes to the historical and formal struggle. The
opening horn calls signal to the possibility of constructing harmonies upon the
interval of a fourth: present in late Liszt in Mephistophelian guise, but
perhaps more commonly associated with subsequent experiments by Bartók.
And
yet, a symphony this undoubtedly remains, far more so than Wagner’s Idyll. Schoenberg was always as much
conservative as radical; indeed, it was, he would claim, to maintain the
supremacy of German ‘tradition’ that he would soon feel compelled by historical
necessity to take the fateful steps he did, first renouncing tonality (although
he would, not unreasonably, reject the term ‘atonality’), and then developing
his twelve-note method. We are not there yet; the tonality of E major remains a
guiding principle, as do modulation and key relationships. Op.9 offers as
inventive a solution to the problem of the twentieth-century symphony as Haydn
had to a genre he may not have invented, but which he surely transformed into
the force with which Beethoven, Wagner, and ultimately Schoenberg would have to
reckon. With the Second String Quartet, op.10, however, Schoenberg – and we – would
feel the air of another planet.
Boulez’s
relationship towards much of Schoenberg has long been ambivalent, even prior to
that article of 1951. That despite the fact that few, if any, performers can
have consistently, persistently done so much for his music; perhaps Boulez’s
only rival in that respect would be Schoenberg’s son-in-law, Michael Gielen. It
is, Boulez has long insisted, a short period in Schoenberg’s œuvre, that of
so-called ‘free atonality’, prior to the composer’s turn to dodecaphony, which
most interests him; and yet, he has continued to perform, in most cases, highly
persuasively, later as well as earlier works, remaining the only conductor to
have recorded Moses und Aron twice.
Brahmsian influence is, at bottom and somewhat to simplify, what most concerns
Boulez in the work of the later Schoenberg. For him, at least, it is Wagnerian
tendencies that remain more fruitful – hardly surprisingly, given the
preponderance of Wagner in Boulez’s operatic repertoire, and the importance of
both Wagner and Mahler for later works such as the orchestral Notations.
sur Incises, like
many of Boulez’s works, has its seeds in an earlier work. Just as Wagner would
take problems, whether musical, philosophical, or both, which had arisen in
previous works as starting-points for subsequent explorations – and indeed,
just as he used material from Siegfried
for the Siegfried-Idyll – so Boulez
has, sometimes repeatedly, returned both to material presented in earlier
works, and in some cases, to earlier works themselves, in order to expand them.
This exploration falls into the former category. Incises is a piano piece written (1994, revised 2001) for the Umberto Micheli Piano Competition (with which
Maurizio Pollini, long an advocate of Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata, had a
strong association), is a brilliant, toccata-like work, written with typical éclat.
Boulez first intended, as he explained in an interview of 1998, to ‘transform
this piece into a longer one for Pollini and a group of instrumentalists, a
kind of piano concerto although without reference to the traditional form. …
Therefore, I produced a piece for three pianos, assuming that there already
exists enough interesting literature for two pianos and ensembles, especially
in the modern age – take for example Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. (In my opinion, everybody
would have been reminded of this world if I had also written a piece for two
pianos.) I have also considered the possibility of four pianos as this
constellation is very attractive and provides a good balance.’ Then, however,
the siren call of Stravinsky – that great anti-Wagnerian, long also considered
Schoenberg’s antipode – and especially Les
Noces suggested another path. As Boulez remarked more recently, in 2010,
‘This is the reason why I ended up with three pianos - incidentally three
pianists are part of our ensemble [Intercontemporain].’ There were likewise
three percussionists in the ensemble, and subsequently, the idea of adding
three harps occurred to him, an idea rendered more attractive by his use of the
instrument in Répons.
It would be possible to say much more about its genesis,
and indeed its different versions, but the work itself, even as
work-in-progress – Boulez’s conception of serialism as ever-expanding,
open-ended, means that many of his works remain in this state – requires more
immanent attention. The spatial element is crucial: we
hear solo lines but also different groups: three groups, considered vertically,
each of percussion, harp, and piano, and, considered horizontally, the three
percussionists, the three harpists, and the three pianists. A startling aspect
of the latter formations is to hear passages transferring spatially across,
say, the three pianos, whilst remaining in a sense part of the one giant piano,
played, as it were, by the conductor. It is as if Boulez plays with a musical
magical square, three rows and columns constantly shifting, and yet always
adding up to the required total, even if we do not know what that should be. Then
there are the beguiling sonorities: Boulez offers harmonies of Debussyan –
again, one might say, post-Wagnerian – sumptuousness. Listen also for the
Romantic tinge to the piano writing; Boulez has long admired the expansion of
the instrument’s capabilities by composers such as Liszt and Chopin. A kinetic,
rhythmic energy brings to mind Stravinsky and Bartók. Indeed, that distancing
from the Sonata for Two Pianos and
Percussion notwithstanding, Bartók’s ghost seems present in some of the
piano writing, contagious for the other instrumentalists. Despite the sense –
and, perhaps for some of us, the desire – that this universe might continue
expanding forever, its material in perpetual proliferation, the conclusion,
whose surprise I shall not reveal, proves decisive. At least for now.
