Henze, Wagner, and the Weight of German Culture

This paper was given at the recent Wagner World Wide conference at the University of South Carolina. It gives a little taste of what will be in the chapter on Henze in my forthcoming book, to be published at the end of this year by Boydell and Brewer, though that will of course both be more detailed and more wide-ranging. I should normally remove, or rather not include, footnotes here, but have retained them, in case they are of any help to someone seeking the sources.

 

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Hans Werner Henze was born in 1926, in Gütersloh, Westphalia, growing up in a village thirty kilometres from Bielefeld, which he would occasionally be able to visit for musical events. He saw himself as having been triply cursed. Not only was he a German, but a German cut off from the preferable ‘south German, Bohemian, and Austrian world of sun and pleasure,’ and also – important for his experience both during and after the war – a German homosexual in what was, to put it mildly, an unfriendly climate.[1] He felt scarred by seeing his father, an apparently liberal schoolmaster, become transformed into not just a party member, but a Nazi enthusiast. Conscripted during total war, he eventually spent several months as a prisoner of war. Henze began to feel, as a German, responsible for the sufferings of the entire continent and sickened by the attitude of many of his countrymen. He would write, concerning his return to Bielefeld: 

The crimes committed in the concentration camps were now being talked about more or less openly, resulting in a growing sense of shame and horror. No one had known a thing. Everyone had been against it. The men and women of the occupying armies looked disbelievingly at us Germans, or their eyes were filled with loathing. Ever since then I have felt ashamed of our country and of my fellow Germans and our people. Wherever my travels have taken me, my origins – my nationality – have always caused me problems, even in Italy. Nor is it any wonder, since the devils who dragged us into this war did such unforgivable and unforgettable things to our neighbours, especially in Rome, not only in their persecution of the Jews but also following Mussolini’s fall from power and during the subsequent partisan struggles.[2]

 

For him, moreover, ‘German art – especially the middle-class, nationalistic art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – became insufferable and suspect’.[3] There are no prizes for guessing that Wagner’s music might fall under that rubric, especially given the strong ties between the Bayreuth Festival and Hitler himself. The weight of tradition had grown steadily after Beethoven, notoriously making Brahms so loath, even for a lengthy period unable, to complete a first symphony. Johann Nikolaus Forkel, in his celebrated 1802 biography of Bach, had portrayed the composer as the musical equivalent of the classical texts upon which German humanist curricula were founded. Bach, the ‘first classic that ever was, or perhaps ever will be,’ was ‘an invaluable national patrimony, with which no other nation has anything else to be compared’.[4] The posthumous role, then, played thereafter by Bach, Beethoven, and more controversially, Wagner, as German national heroes is well known. Yet, as Thomas Mann,  after whose Doctor Faustus Henze would later composer his Third Violin Concerto, knew all too well, there was a difficult, complicated relationship between such musical heroism and Friedrich Meinecke’s ‘German catastrophe’.  What remained was the modernist art proscribed by the Nazis, untainted by association; what had previously been condemned as abstract, degenerate, un-German, and of course Jewish, now offered the opportunity for redemption of German music: a message for ‘outsiders’ that would never leave Henze and would inform the construction, conscious or otherwise, of his image.

 

For National Socialism had prevented German musicians, composers included, for the first time in centuries from keeping in touch with the latest musical developments. Thus for composers such as Henze and the young Stockhausen, the International Summer School for New Music in Darmstadt, founded in 1946, offered the opportunity to catch up. The occupying powers, subsequently West Germany’s allies, were generally happy to encourage and indeed to subsidise the ‘break’ with the country’s past, although reconstruction, as in other areas of German cultural life, was encouraged too. Moreover, the increasing ‘anti-formalist’ hostility towards twelve-note and serialist works from the East German authorities with their approved ‘socialist realism’ gave an opportunity for an allegedly ‘free’ West to distinguish itself from so-called ‘totalitarianism’ not only past but present. These factors give a number of clues as to why the more politically committed composers such as Henze might eventually find themselves out on something of a limb. How might they reconcile membership of the avant-garde with their political commitment, given that the avant-garde seemed increasingly apolitical or even reactionary? For Western European composers of all nationalities, the strictness of Webern’s apparently hermetic compositional method, somehow divorced from his utterly German context, provided the denationalised precedent – or at least so did a ‘productive misreading’, as it has generally come to be known, of his music. Even the fact of Webern’s shooting in 1945 somehow seemed to ‘fit’ the myth-making requirements of new music. The problem, at least for some, was that in practice this had begun to veer towards a doctrinaire, almost totalitarian attitude on the part of the high priests of the avant-garde. Henze connected this with a revisiting of the catastrophic German past and contrasted it with the freedom of his immersion in Italian life. The tragic irony was that the attempt to nullify the past, or perhaps in some cases to ignore it, led to its return. His recounting the first performance of his Nachtstücke und Arien in 1957 is instructive of the chasm that had opened:

… three representatives of the other wing – Boulez, my friend Gigi Nono and Stockhausen – leapt to their feet after only the first few bars and pointedly left the hall, eschewing the beauties of my latest endeavours. … I suddenly found ourselves [that is, he and Ingeborg Bachmann, who provided the texts] cold-shouldered by people who actually knew us … There was a sense of indignation throughout the building, no doubt made worse by the fact that the audience had acclaimed our piece in the liveliest manner… The impression arose that the whole of the world of music had turned against me, a situation that was really quite comical, but also somewhat disturbing from an ethical point of view: for what had become of artistic freedom? Who had the right to confuse moral and æsthetic criteria?[5]

 

This conflict between freedom and authority, and the question of what freedom might really entail, is dramatised in Henze’s opera, Der Prinz von Homburg (‘The Prince of Homburg’), which has its origins in Kleist’s Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, a surprisingly militaristic, indeed Prussian, text for either Henze or his librettist, Ingeborg Bachmann. Needless to say, many modifications are made. Der Prinz von Homburg was first performed in 1960, Henze provocatively claiming his model to be nineteenth-century Italian opera.’[6] Verdi and Donizetti seemed at least as much his anti-Wagners as inspirations in themselves. ‘Every bar,’ he would write, ‘reveals Verdi’s influence as a music dramatist.’[7] Such remarks, such intentional implicit criticism of Wagner, could certainly never have emanated from Schoenberg, his circle, nor from anyone seeking to position himself in the role of successor to the Second Viennese School. The claim of an ‘Italian model’ was indeed largely rhetorical, for Henze also tells us that the drama ‘very much cried out for this contrast between dodecaphony and what – with a pinch of salt – might be termed traditional harmony: the dialectics of the law and its violation, of dreams and reality, of mendaciousness and truth.’[8] One could also point to the Nietzschean dialectic – actually Wagnerian in origin – between Apollo and Dionysus. This is all thoroughly Germanic, not Italian at all, but so of course is the desire to escape from Germany to the warm Meditteranean south. Henze’s words are thoroughly German.

 

Needless to say, many modifications are made; the Prince’s battle-cry, ‘In Staub mit allen Feinden Brandenburgs,’ bidding Brandenburg’s foes return to dust, no longer plays a role of jubilation, quite otherwise, in Bachmann’s and Henze’s conception, which might be understood to echo Brecht’s earlier (1939) rewriting, a sonnet upon the play, the prince lying not dead but ‘on his back with all the foes of Brandenburg in the dust’.[9] As Frederic Jameson remarked in that very context, ‘where American pop psychology would evoke adaptation, Brecht overtly specifies learning.’[10] So do Bachmann and Henze, knowing, or at least believing, not unlike Wagner with his mediæval sources, that their audience will be aware of the ‘original’, though without going to the extreme of making appreciation dependent upon that knowledge, without tending to the world, as it were, of meta-art. To present march rhythms on the harp, for instance, rather than trumpets and drums, seems in context a statement, an inversion, in itself, both of pacification and of passive aggression against the political (and æsthetic) authorities that had brought the world to war and might do so again

 

The first two scenes of Henze’s second act are punctuated by the repetition of distorted brass fanfares, as Friedrich realises that he is hemmed in: ‘I am lost’, he sings.  (Unfortunately, I do not have time to play an excerpt.) Nothing changes; what can he do? He has broken the law in order to attain victory for the Elector of Brandenburg, and death will be his reward. The contrast between twelve-note technique and Henze’s ‘traditional harmony’ evokes not only musical but also dramatic crisis – and, in a broader sense, the dialectic of crisis between the modern subject and the objective world. Meanwhile, the ‘modern’ quality of the fanfares suggests the powerlessness of the subject in relation to the fatal power of the state and its laws. Always we seem to return to the opening scene of this act, to Friedrich’s powerless plight. In Henze’s own words:

Der Prinz von Homburg… sets itself against the blind unimaginative application of laws, in favour of an exaltation of human kindness, an understanding of which reaches into deeper and more complex realms than would be ‘normal’ and which seeks to find a place for a man in this world even though he is a Schwärmer and a dreamer, or perhaps because of that.[11]

 

Are the laws of Brandenburg as impervious as those of Schoenberg and, after him and deadlier still, Darmstadt, let alone those of the Third Reich, being reconstructed before their eyes? Could things actually be otherwise, without a radical transformation of society as a whole? That brings us to the question of intention. Henze claimed:

 

I have striven for greater freedom, or at least what I understand by it: certainly not improvisation, but independence, and a preparedness for decisions outside established categories. Music is not musicology, and the logic of a work rests on a unique constellation of incident, encounter, experience, agreement; it transcends inherited rules, construction, calculation. It seems that the vegetative element of music surpasses its other, lesser, musicological dimension, and that, as in the life of the Prince of Homburg, illuminations and discoveries take place in dreams, not in the laboratory. Not, however, in a state of haziness, but in the wakefulness of sleepwalkers, where facts are perceived with abnormal clarity.[12]

 

There is something Romantic about this; we might imagine ourselves returned to Wagner’s Nuremberg. Walther’s Prize Song was conceived in a dream, although it then had to be refined by the Master, Hans Sachs. Moreover, Walther’s songs also transcended inherited rules and calculation, outstepped established categories. Henze’s drama throws up another Meistersinger problem. Where is the social world; where is the public nature of art? A dream is all very well, but without transmission and reception it remains but a dream.

 

International climax was arguably centred upon the triumphant 1966 premiere of The Bassarids at the Salzburg Festival – Karajan’s citadel, no less. Aware of Henze’s hostility towards much Wagner, his librettist WH Auden had coaxed him very much in that direction, insisting that he study the score of Götterdämmerung – Henze always had less of a problem with Tristan, and indeed would write his own Tristan-work himself – and even had him attend a performance in Vienna, where he met Adorno, incidentally, intently studying his score, in order, according to his autobiography, that he should ‘learn to overcome’ his ‘aversions to Wagner’s music, aversions bound up in no small measure with my many unfortunate experiences in the past’. And, of course, with Germany’s many unfortunate experiences in the all-too-recent past. Success was at best mixed. According to his autobiography: 

 

I was perfectly capable of judging the wider significance of Wagner’s music: as any fool can tell you, it is a summation of all Romantic experience … But I simply cannot abide this silly and self-regarding emotionalism, behind which it is impossible not to detect a neo-German mentality and ideology. There is the sense of an imperialist threat, of something militantly nationalistic, something disagreeably heterosexual and Aryan in all these rampant horn calls, this pseudo-Germanic Stabreim, these incessant chords of a seventh and all the insecure heroes and villains that people Wagner’s librettos.[13]

 

The result was nevertheless in many respects Henze’s most Wagnerian drama, and one which he considered confronted ‘this “I was always against the Nazis”’ position, ‘a banal and frivolous stance (created on … stage in the last scene…)’.[14] At the time, Henze was willing to consider that the musical path from Tristan, at least, might be of some importance in his work. In an interview for Die Welt, marking the premiere, he proclaimed his belief ‘that the road from Tristan to Mahler and Schoenberg is far from finished, and with The Bassarids I have tried to go further along it.’[15] Moreover, he could claim impeccable musical and German warrant for what many would decry as the score’s eclecticism:

 

It may be unfashionable to continue musical traditions in this way [he is specifically referring to the use of symphonic forms in the opera’s four ‘movements’], but with Goethe under my pillow, I’m not going to lose any sleep about the possibility of being accused of eclecticism. Goethe’s definition ran: ‘An eclectic … is anyone who, from that which surrounds him, takes what corresponds to his nature.’ If you wanted to do so, you could count Bach, Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Mahler, and Stravinsky as eclectics …[16]

 

The composer could not, should not, ‘spend all his time destroying language instead of developing it dialectically’.[17]

 

That said, the very success of the opera in so bourgeois a context troubled Henze, that unease not merely coincidental with his political move from what he would call ‘generalised anti-fascism’, inspired, he explained, by the example of Italian Marxist friends. He had intervened politically, not least in 1965 during Willy Brandt’s election campaign, but now, from Rudi Dutschke and his comrades he ‘now learned to see contexts, and to see myself within those contexts’. This was why he took the decision that he would write not for himself and his friends, but ‘to help socialism’, that he would embody in his work ‘all the problems of contemporary bourgeois music,’ and yet ‘transform these into something that the masses can understand’. This certainly did not involve submitting to commercial considerations, but nor was there any ‘place for worry about losing elite notions of value’.[18] In September 1968, Henze published a declaration, ‘Mein Standpunkt’, ending:

 

Unnecessary are new museums, opera houses, and world premieres. Necessary, to set about the realisation of dreams. Necessary, to abolish the dominion of men over men. Necessary, to change mankind, which is to say: necessary, the creation of mankind’s greatest work of art: the World Revolution.[19]

 

Those words could almost have come straight from an earlier German revolutionary-composer’s pen, from Wagner’s 1849 Die Revolution.[20] Henze had by this time lent his support to the APO (the Ausserparlamentarische Opposition) and the SDS (the Socialist German Student-league).

 

This brings us to Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer, entitled a ‘show for seventeen performers’, rather than an opera. Work began in January 1971, when Henze and some friends recorded street sounds near the Zoo Station in West Berlin, along with newspaper extracts read onto tape at varying tempi and pitches. The text’s author was a Chilean poet, Gastón Salvatore, who had been an active participant as a member of the Socialist German Student-league in the events of 1968, was imprisoned for a few months thereafter, and was Salvador Allende’s nephew. It is worth quoting from Salvatore’s account, which introduces the printed score: 

Natascha Ungeheuer is the siren of a false utopia. She promises the leftist bourgeois a new kind of security, which will permit him to preserve his revolutionary ‘class conscience’ without taking an active part in class warfare. This false Utopia should be regarded as an all-denying immobility, as a kind of cowardice, which permits itself to appear identified with the ‘Revolution’ and believe that such an identity could equal the consummation of revolution.

Such an existentialistic, non-historical form of political self-reflection places the leftist bourgeois in the position of exploiting the proletarian struggle, as an occasion for a merely self-indulgent moralising. He ‘muddles through’ between the temptation either to surrender consciousness and return to the bourgeoisie or to choose one of the two possible forms of helplessness: either that of the lonely Avant-garde in their homes or that of Social Democracy.

Natascha Ungeheuer promises both possibilities. The leftist bourgeois sets out for her apartment, plagued by all the anxieties and insecurities which characterise his social position ... Natascha Ungeheuer knows ... [them] only too well. She torments him, she provokes him, yet at the same time she lures him into her apartment ...

The leftist bourgeois ... refuses to go the full way to the apartment of Natascha Ungeheuer. He has not yet discovered his way to the revolution. He knows that he must turn back on the way he has gone so far, and begin again.

 

Everything about the work – its ideological intention, its music, and its staging – was calculated to provoke, and it was roundly booed when performed at West Berlin’s impeccably bourgeois Deutsche Oper.

 

The musical forces required are a vocalist – a baritone of sorts – a brass quintet, a Hammond organ, percussion, a jazz ensemble, allegedly redolent of the Berlin underground, though perhaps a few decades late, and, perhaps most notably, denoting the bourgeois origins of the protagonist, an instrumental quintet (piano, flute, clarinet, viola, and cello) identical to that used in Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. Here is sickly, decadent, bourgeois expressionism. (Here, I might personally add, is the more compelling music; perhaps Henze spoke more truly than he realised.) To underline the already heavy symbolism, Henze, who also directed the first performances, had the Pierrot quintet – Peter Maxwell Davies’s Fires of London – dress in blood-soaked white coats, each member sporting a different physical injury: ‘one with eye bandaged,’ presumably a coincidental homage to Wotan, ‘another his leg and yet another his arm in plaster of Paris, etc., etc.’ Once again, conflict between different sound worlds, representing different aspects of the political and social situation is readily apparent in what is notably called a deutsches Lied, a German song.

 

 [text and translation at end]

 

In a 1972 interview, Henze also made an interesting connection with his experience of Italian opera and the physicality of the human voice he experienced in that, and implicitly not in German tradition:

 

When I wrote my first opera, Boulevard Solitude in 1951 – it had its premiere the following year – 50 per cent of it was dance. The singers were treated in rather a statuesque manner because I didn't believe in the traditional movements for them. I overcame that view when I saw Italian opera and I realised that the physical presence of music in a human body is much stronger in a singer because of his voice. This process of making music physically present is still concerning me today. In Cimarrón and Natascha Ungeheuer, I make even the musicians visible and they more or less become actors. I think I will pursue this line.[21]

 

The score tells us that ‘the work can be performed in gymnasiums, in the open air or on concert platforms.’ Yet, the opera house, or at least the theatre, retains a certain primacy. ‘When performed on the stage, dance elements and lighting effects can be increased. It is conceivable to blend in films and to add to the scenic actions.’ Shorn of the optionality and translated into Hegelian, Henze’s notes might come from Wagner’s Opera and Drama. This is a Gesamtkunstwerk of the early 1970s, however much Henze might have wished to escape Wagner’s legacy.

 

The protagonist’s predicament was clearly Henze’s own: stuck somewhere between Natascha’s flat in Kreuzberg and the German bourgeoisie which, even during his self-exile, had funded so many of his activities to date – and would continue to do so. However, most of his audience had not even begun its journey. In Henze’s words, ‘our hero does not reach his destination: but … he hears in his head the sirenlike voice of Comrade Natascha, who, far from welcoming and accommodating, reels off a list of objections to him.’ Has nagging Fricka been resurrected, post-Götterdämmerung, to assail our artist-Wotan? ‘Attempts to renew his bourgeois connections prove a failure. It is a lonely show that our hero stages.’[22] Having turned back from the former, he does not return to the latter, though it remains quite unclear what will happen next. Such would be the besetting yet fruitful problematic of Henze’s career and œuvre.

 

L’Upupa und der Triumph der Sohnesliebe, another Salzburg commission (2003), would be in character if not in form his Singspiel, a loving tribute to the composer of Die Zauberflöte. However, despite its debts to Wagner and to Berg, Henze still did not feel comfortable with an unalloyed tribute to the former and never really would; Mozart was for many reasons more approachable. And yet, in an unguarded moment during a 2010 interview, shortly before the British premiere of his penultimate opera, Phaedra, Henze would aver, ‘German music, it’s difficult to match isn’t it? It’s so rich and so deep and has inspired so many adventures – and still can, I believe.’[23] If he had not yet made peace with German politics – and why should he have done so in the age of Merkel any more than during the era of Adenauer? – then the richness of his engagement with German music, and more broadly German history and culture, would never be in doubt.

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8. deutsches lied

bruitage (40″)

FEMALE VOICE

was treibt die revolution

 VOCALIST (ausdruckslos, noch immer seine zigarette rollend)     

danke

            in diesen zeiten

            ist sie ein wenig fett geworden

(eine silbe wie die andere)

hinter der allgewalt von genähten und

eingedämmten winden

 

bedeckt mit rechenschiebern brüsten

            und mahlzeiten

von schlafsäcken und

hodenentzündungen begleitet

eintönig wie ein endloses sinken

breiten sich aus die kreuzberger

wohunungen

…

 

8. german song

 

how is the revolution coming

(expressionless, still rolling his cigarette)

thank you

during these times

it has become a little fat

 behind the overpowering strength of

            the sewn-in and dammed-up

winds

protected by slide-rule bosoms and

mealtimes

accompanied by sleeping bags and

            inflamed testicles

monotonous like an endless sinking

lies the expanse of kreuzberg flats

…

---

[1] Hans Werner Henze, Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography, tr. Stewart Spencer (Faber: London, 1999), p.22.

[2] Ibid., p.53.

[3] Ibid., p.53.

[4] Johann Nikolai Forkel, Über Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, Kunst und Kunstwerke, ed. Claudia Maria Knipsel (Henschel: Berlin, 2000), pp.21-22

[5] Henze, Bohemian Fifths, p.146.                                                                                                                            

[6] Ibid., p.161.

[7] Ibid., p.161.

[8] Ibid., p. 156.

[9] Heinrich von Kleist, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (Echo Library, Teddington, 2007), p.75; Bertolt Brecht, ‘Sonnet über Kleists Stück “Prinz von Homburg”,’ reprinted with commentary by Walter Benjamin, in ‘Commentary on Poems by Brecht,’ tr. Edmund Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, eds Howard Eiland and Michael W Jennings, 4 vols (Harvard University Press: Harvard, 1996-2003), vol.4, pp.237-8.

[10] Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (Verso: New York and London, 1998), p.90.

[11] Henze, ‘Der Prinz von Homburg,’ in Music and Politics: Collected Writings 1953-81, tr. Peter Labanyi (Faber: London, 1982), p. 102.

[12] Ibid., p.104.

[13] Henze, Bohemian Fifths, p. 207.

[14] Henze, ‘German Music in the 1940s and 1950s,’ in Music and Politics, p.35.

[15] Henze, ‘The Bassarids: (1) Tradition and cultural heritage,’ in ibid., p.145.

[16] Ibid., p.145.

[17] Henze, ‘The Bassarids: (3) Symphony in One Act,’ in Music and Politics, p.153.

[18] ‘Art and the Revolution,’ in Music and Politics, pp. 179-80.

[19] Quoted in Andrew Porter, ‘Henze’s “Young Lord”,’ in The Musical Times, 110 (1969), p.1028.

[20] Richard Wagner, ‘Die Revolution,’ in Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, eds Richard Sternfeld and Hans von Wolzogen, 16 vols in 10 (Breitkopf und Härtel: Leipzig, 1912-4), vol.12, pp.245-51.

[21] Interview with Alan Blyth, in Gramophone, 49 (1972), p.1690.

[22] Henze, Bohemian Fifths, p.303.

[23] Interview with Ivan Hewett, Daily Telegraph, 7 January 2010.

Pires/LSO/Haitink: Britten, Mozart, and Beethoven, 12 February 2013

Barbican Hall

Britten – Four Sea Interludes from ‘Peter Grimes’, op.33a

Mozart – Piano Concerto no.17 in G major, KV 453
Beethoven – Symphony no.7 in A major, op.92

Maria João Pires (piano)

London Symphony Orchestra

Bernard Haitink (conductor).

There is not a great deal of Britten orchestral music, so this anniversary year will doubtless hear a good few outings for the Four Sea Interludes. I doubt that any will come better than this scorching – drenching? – account from Bernard Haitink and the London Symphony Orchestra. The opening strings of ‘Dawn’ managed to sound both translucent and brilliant, answered by woodwind marine fantasy and grave foreboding from the brass. The movement was as dramatically pregnant as I have heard, perhaps still more so: what we have lost in Haitink’s continued absence from the Royal Opera House, and what, during that period, the LSO has gained! Britten is at his best when his music is evidently ‘constructed’ – think of The Turn of the Screw, surely his masterpiece – and constructed is just how ‘Sunday Morning’ sounded here. Its building-up of fourths put me distantly in mind of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony and of Bartók. Again, Britten is at his best when rescued from parochialism, likewise the festival he founded at Aldeburgh. Even if some of the movement and much of the ensuing ‘Moonlight’ sounds uncomfortably close to the banalities of Shostakovich, Haitink shaped them very well indeed. The conductor unsurprisingly schewed easy histrionics in the ‘Storm’ in favour of structural integrity, always a Haitink watchword. The LSO brass were in fantastic form, but so, to be fair, was the entire orchestra. It was then a pity, to put it mildly, that a man seated across the aisle from me started to snore loudly; it was also astonishing, given the decibel and voltage levels. Would that his neighbour had taken the trouble to awaken him, both here and in the Mozart concerto that followed.

 

The G major Piano Concerto, KV 453, opened with a well articulated, resolutely unsentimentalised tutti. Perhaps, though, Haitink might have allowed the music to smile a little more; Sir Colin Davis would have done. Nevertheless, Haitink’s command of structure remained something for which to be grateful. Maria João Pires’s playing was immaculately turned, her ear for phrasing unerring. Ultimately, though, this first movement never quite displayed the ravishing Mozartian pleasure that it ought. Matters improved in the slow movement: Haitink did not prove too brisk, as he has sometimes done recently. The piano part was poised throughout, Pires exhibiting a touch to die for. Strings were beautifully veiled for the minor mode section, the interplay between them and Pires beyond reproach. Whatever had been missing in the first movement was now certainly present. This was serious, as it should be, but never ponderous. Haitink hit upon just the right Papageno-tempo for the finale; far too often one hears it taken as an Allegro rather than Allegretto, having the late change of tempo result in a mere scramble. Again, Pires’s phrases were exquisitely shaped, though no more so than those of the LSO woodwind. The fathomless profundity of Mozart’s chromaticism effortlessly registered, as did the operatic joy of diatonic release.

 

The last time before this I had heard Haitink conduct Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, it had been in the very same hall, though with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. In many respects this LSO account proved very similar – sadly, including the problematic nature of the finale. That said, there was much to enjoy earlier on. The introduction to the first movement demonstrated that precision and weight were anything but antithetical. There was a profound sense of inevitability, of something set in motion that would take some time to resolve. A Vivace of almost Brahmsian satisfaction ensued. No ‘points’ were being made; Beethoven’s melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic invention seemed simply to speak for themselves, art concealing art both in composition and performance. How refreshing for an age in which the more extreme the perversity inflicted on Beethoven – it did not start with Harnoncourt, and he is not the worst offender, yet he remains emblematic – the more loudly it will be hailed in fashionable circles. If much of Haitink’s recent Beethoven has proved oddly driven, here at least he seemed to have taken a step back, and attained the sort of implacability one associates with Klemperer. There were incidental pleasures, for instance the backward recapitulatory glance towards the Pastoral offered by the LSO woodwind, but structural integrity was again the overall determinant. A grinding coda bass line was a case in point, never exaggerated, and thus all the more telling.

 

The slow movement – and yes, I know describing it as such is a red rag to certain bulls – was not undersold; well, not grievously, anyway. It retained considerable darkness of tone and the sense of a processional despite the swift tempo chosen by Haitink. After recent lamentable Beethoven performances in London from the likes of Esa-Pekka Salonen and Vladimir Jurowski, this came as a considerable relief, perhaps particularly given the quibbles one might have had with the performance if considered in the abstract. This flowed in the best sense, even if it remained somewhat earthbound when considered in the light of Daniel Barenboim’s astounding Proms performance last summer. The scherzo veered towards the unduly driven, but for the most part retained a degree of freshness. Haitink permitted a slight relaxation for the trio, though, Romantic that I remain, I could not help but wish for a little more. The LSO woodwind managed nevertheless not to sacrifice all sense of the Mozartian serenade: impressive indeed, at such a tempo! However, the finale, as in Haitink’s Concertgebouw performance, proved relentless, the drive imparted antithetical to Beethoven’s humanity. Orchestral weight remained, but this was a hectoring account: clearly Haitink’s present conception, but one which, despite a breakneck tempo, lumbered rather than danced.

 

Eugene Onegin, Royal Opera, 11 February 2013

Eugene Onegin (Simon Keenlyside)
Images: Bill Cooper

Royal Opera House

 

Tatyana – Krassimira Stoyanova

Eugene Onegin – Simon Keenlyside
Young Tatyana – Vigdis Hentze Olsen
Mme Larina – Diana Montague
Filipyevna – Kathleen Wilkinson
Olga – Elena Maximova
Peasant Singer – Elliot Goldie
Young Onegin – Thom Rackett
Lensky – Pavol Breslik
Monsieur Triquet – Christophe Mortagne
Captain – Michel de Souza
Zaletsky – Jihoon Kim
Guillot – Luke Price
Prince Gremin – Peter Rose

Kasper Holten (director)
Mia Stensgaard (set designs)
Katrina Lindsay (costumes)
Wolfgang Göbbel (lighting)
Leo Warner (video)
Lawrence Watson (animation)
Signe Fabricius (choreography)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Robin Ticciati (conductor)

Kasper Holten’s new production of Eugene Onegin, his first staging for the Royal Opera House, was in many ways excellent, an auspicious debut indeed. Unfortunately, it was truly let down by some of the most lacklustre conducting I have heard at Covent Garden. Whilst an interesting, intriguing evening was still to be pieced together from production and singing, it would be idle to pretend that Robin Ticciati’s jejune performance did not detract significantly from the experience. To start with, it seemed as though Ticciati’s reading might prove interestingly different. The balletic side to Tchaikovsky seemed on the verge of shining through, the woodwind section of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House offering sparkling playing, and what a nice change it made for once to hear the harp! Alas, it soon emerged that those advantages had been achieved largely by default. It became impossible to ignore the thinness of the string sound, despite a sizeable number of strings in the pit. That was not on account of any ineptitude of execution by the players, who remained polished throughout, but because Ticciati seemingly wished to elicit the sound of a middle-ranking chamber orchestra from one of the best opera house bands in the world. Fair enough if you simply have to put up with a small number of strings, or even if you are playing in a small house, but such was not of course the case here. More damagingly still, the performance dragged, at times interminably so. Without any sense of life – not to be confused with alleged ‘airiness’ – and without any sense of Tchaikovsky’s tormented soul, the only signs of anything dramatic being at stake had to be gleaned elsewhere: a great pity. Let me be clear. This was not about ‘intimacy’, about approaching Tchaikovsky’s ‘scenes’ in the manner in which they were first performed at the Moscow Conservatoire – although the perversity did have something in common, albeit significantly magnified, with the attempt by Ticciati’s mentor, Sir Simon  Rattle, to present an ‘intimate’ Carmen upon the vast stage of Salzburg’s Grosses Festspielhaus. Nor was it about actual speed; I genuinely have no idea whether the performance was fast, slow, or middling, by the clock. What I do know is that it dragged, despite sometimes being unduly driven, because Ticciati proved hopelessly incapable of finding a pulse, variable or otherwise. Instead of intimacy and interesting if unusual tempi, we had mere thinness and tedium.

 

Tatyana (Krassimira Stoyanova)

Holten’s production, on the other hand, offered what was often a searching exploration of memory. Inscribed into the score, its visual manifestation was effected by a number of means. Most obvious, but far from the only example, was the use of doubles, a young Tatyana and a young Onegin, to observe, to remind, to haunt. Mirroring the structure – some might say the lopsidedness – of Tchaikovsky’s drama, the young Tatyana is often seen during the first four scenes, whereas her counterpart does not emerge until the older, wiser Onegin appears in St Petersburg. The two young figures meet only in the final scene, offering a glimpse of what might have been, but what is now cruelly denied. Or should that read, 'wisely denied'? For in a fascinating gloss, Prince Gremin appears in that scene too: no longer a mere doddery if noble old fool, he too will have to learn to live with the truth. I can imagine that some might have found the histrionic display of the young Tatyana during the Letter Scene a little much, but by the same token, it seems a valid response to one side at least of the music – and Tchaikovsky’s character. It does not last very long, moreover, and more important seems to be the slippage between the two Tatyanas: who is writing? Who is truly affected? Is this for once an attempt to construct, with all the potential for failure that might entail, a character who is more than Tchaikovsky’s self-projection?

 

Colour is used to great effect: an especially telling moment is the infection through lighting and film of the outside world – or is it again a projection, this time from Tatyana herself? – with Tatyana’s scarlet, following the Letter Scene? Has she been rash, to put it mildly? Is this foreboding? Does her uneasy relationship to the outside world doom her to an unhappy, unsociable life? Is this where it all goes wrong, the moment to which her elder self will perforce return, time and time again? The relationship between books and memory is of course not a new concept in Onegin productions, but it is a good one, and their presence at Mme Larina’s house, not least in Tatyana’s hands, makes its point well. As time went on, above all in St Petersburg, it was as if Tchaikovsky’s and Pushkin’s reminiscences were straining towards Wagnerian leitmotif. They did not and could not reach it; technique and indeed aspiration are quite different. But I could not help but wonder if Holten’s Wagnerian experience played a role here. If only there could have been some counterpart to that in the conducting, which continued signally to fail to join up the dots. Let us hope that the production will be revived with someone else in the pit. A conductor with whom the Royal Opera House has a strong relationship, such as Semyon Bychkov, who has a fine Onegin recording to his name already? That might really be something.

 

Lensky (Pavol Breslik)

The cast was for the most part excellent too. Krassimira Stoyanova’s Tatyana was beautifully sung, no mere cipher, but a strong, flawed character, uncertain of where she was heading and all the more credible for that. I was a little disconcerted by Simon Keenlyside’s Onegin during the first act; it seemed coarser than I recalled from a few years ago. But dramatic truth gained over ‘mere’ beauty, for this Onegin gained in insight as the work progressed, quite in tandem with the production. As ever, Keenlyside’s way with words, just like Stoyanova’s, was pretty much beyond reproach. Beauty there was aplenty in the honeyed tones of Pavol Breslik, every inch the Romantic poet; his verbal acuity was no less impressive. Holten had elected to downplay, even to ignore, the homoeroticism of the relationship between Onegin and Lensky: a pity, since it so permeates the score, but of course the director had other ideas to explore. Instead we witnessed two young, quite immature men as genuine rivals for the affections or at least the attentions of their women. Olga was finely and richly sung by Elena Maximova, whilst Diana Montague and Kathleen Wilkinson almost stole the show with their equally fine portrayals of Mme Larina and Filipyevna. The only disappointments were an unidiomatic Zaretsky from Jihoon Kim and an intonationally-challenged Triquet from Christophe Mortagne. Peter Rose’s Gremin did everything it should – and more. Likewise the Royal Opera Chorus was on splendid form, for which Renato Balsadonna should once again receive considerable credit.

 

London Sinfonietta/Hannigan - Satie and Stravinsky, 10 February 2013

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Satie – Socrate

Stravinsky – Three Pieces for string quartet
Three Pieces for clarinet
Concertino
Renard

Barbara Hannigan (soprano/director)

Daniel Norman (tenor)
Edgaras Montvidas (tenor)
Roderick Williams (bass)
John Molloy (bass)
Reinbert de Leeuw (piano)
Timothy Lines (clarinet)
Harriet Walter (narrator)
Timberlake Wertenbaker (script writer)
London Sinfonietta

 

This concert was part of a greater weekend of concerts at the Southbank Centre looking at Paris during the second and third decades of the twentieth century, the weekend itself part of the year-long Rest is Noise season. An arresting opening – which I initially feared would irritate, but which actually worked very well – was provided by Harriet Walter’s narration, replete with East Coast accent, presenting a first-person sketch, written by Timberlake Wertenbaker, of the life of Winnaretta Singer. Daughter of the inventor of the sewing machine, Isaac Singer, Winnaretta went on to become the celebrated musical patroness, Princess Edmund de Polignac, commissioning both Socrate and Renard, though Diaghilev’s machinations and Stravinsky’s duplicity – at least according to this account – meant that her salon would not host the latter work’s premiere. Walter’s delivery of the script was just as excellent as one would expect from this fine actress: never overdone, effortlessly convincing.  I wondered a little about the Princess’s, or rather Wertenbaker’s, claim that patrons go unsung. Not in my lectures they do not; indeed, I sometimes wonder whether I over-emphasise their role. I also wondered whether a male patron would have received quite so sympathetic a treatment: might we not at least have been led to think, ‘why should someone inherit all that money in the first place?’ But those are quibbles, and the narration, heard before Socrate and before Renard seemed to go down well with the audience.

 

Satie’s Socrate: oh dear. I tried; I really did. Doubtless some will say that was the problem. But for me, its sole redeeming feature was the excellence of the performances from Barbara Hannigan and Reinbert de Leeuw. Cool, white, monotonous, with the occasional subtle colouring of the vocal line: soprano and pianist were really beyond reproach. However, a work, like so much of Satie, which seems set up to forestall criticism – whatever you say against it, someone will respone, ‘well that is the point’ – had better be of Stravinskian quality if, as, for instance The Rake’s Progress does, it attempts that disabling tactic. Frankly, it makes one long even for the dullest of Stravinsky: Apollo, or Orpheus, say. Its lengthy ‘setting’ of Plato – is it really a ‘setting’ at all, when it seems to respond no more to the text than Rossini does in much of his Stabat Mater? – drones on and on, until, by the time the third part, ‘La Mort de Socrate’ opens, one feels as if one has been suffering the same composer’s Vexations. What a strange conception of ancient Greece this is; it almost makes one sympathise with Nietzsche’s venom against Socrates. The artists, admirably controlled throughout, made the most of the slight suggestion of drama as we heard of the poison’s arrival, but if the best one can say about something is that it is somewhat less tedious than the music of Philip Glass, perhaps it is time to wonder whether Satie has an Emperor, let alone clothes.

 

Stravinsky’s invention thus struck the hall like a thunderbolt. It always does, at least in good performances, and these performances were certainly that. A string quartet (Jonathan Morton, Joan Atherton, Paul Silverthorne, Tim Gill, all standing save for the cellist) drawn from the London Sinfonietta brought us the composer’s astonishing Three Pieces. The work’s strangeness, its utter dissociation from anything one might consider to constitute a string quartet repertoire and tradition still shocks – and certainly did so here. Defiantly post-Rite of Spring, this is in many senses a far more radical break with ‘tradition’, as unique as Le Roi des étoiles. Tightly focused rhythms and – as soon as one bothered to listen – a profusion of melody were hallmarks of this account. The final piece brought a sense of the hieratic, but what a contrast it made with the mere tedium of Satie. Here was music. Timothy Lines offered strong performances of the Three Pieces for clarinet, written five years later in 1919. If the first offered a gentler, one is almost tempted to say pastoral, sound-world, it remained utterly Stravinskian in its evident ‘construction’. And in any case, there was nothing remotely gentle about its joyous successor, nor to the third, which seemed to anticipate the world of Renard. The performance was rich in tonal and dynamic differentiation, rhythm propelling the notes and their ‘meaning’. The 1920 Concertino for string quartet followed, though oddly the programme had no notes on it. Again, the utterly individual approach of the composer not only to the medium of the string quartet but to stringed instruments themselves was immediately announced. A kaleidoscope of what Stravinsky would have hated one to call ‘moods’ – unless, of course, he arbitrarily decided to use the word, as in his Norwegian Moods – revealed itself during the work’s brief span. Here was concision to rival Webern, yet long before Stravinsky’s serialist turn. It sounded almost akin to a mechanised Beethoven Bagatelle.

 

Hannigan turned director for the wonderful burlesque, Renard, given in concert performance, Colour and rhythm were very much to the fore in a performance for which she seemed to act more as enabler than dictator. Old Stravinsky hands that the London Sinfonietta are, that is doubtless the right way around. Thematic consistency during and after the opening March was especially noteworthy; this was no mere collection of episodes. Even when the Cock turned languid, ‘Sizhu na dubu...’ (‘I’m on my perch...’), rhythmic underpinning remained tight. There was room for seduction too, from the Fox with his cake. But above all what struck was the visceral nature of Stravinsky’s score, so truthful a representation of the or at least a childhood imagination. The London Sinfonietta’s performance could not be faulted; the four vocal soloists proved fine advocates too. If the tenors perhaps captured greater attention, that is probably more a reflection of score than performance. Why do we not hear this work more often?

Iain Burnside, Jouneying Boys, Royal College of Music Vocal Faculty, 8 February 2013

Britten Theatre, Royal College of Music

Arthur Rimbaud – Peter Kirk

Djami, Sanjit – Oscar Castellino
Gaubert, Milo – Nicholas Pritchard
Paul Verlaine – Matthew Buswell
Ernest Cabaner, Fletcher – Paul McKenzie
Beauchene, Trevor – Simon Gilkes
Florence, A, Caroline – Elizabeth Holmes
Mathilde Maute, Alex – Rowan Pierce
Mme Maute, Daisy, I – Rachel Bowden
E, Lavinia – Jennifer Carter
O, Imogen – Anna Anandarajah
U, Cheryl – Soraya Mafi
Benjamin Britten – Matthew Ward
W H Auden – Jerome Knox
Christopher Isherwood, Gus – Nicholas Morton
Lavinia – Jennifer Carter

Rimbaud (Peter Kirk), Djami (Oscar Castellino), Gaubert (Nicholas Pritchard)

Iain Burnside (director)

Giuseppe Belli (set designs)
Stephen Pelton (director)
Jools Osborns (costumes)
Paul Tucker (lighting)

 

Iain Burnside’s new play, apparently ‘conceived over a club sandwich’ taken with Nick Sears, Head of Vocal Studies at the Royal College of Music, is focused upon Britten’s Les Illuminations, though with a stronger emphasis on the poet Arthur Rimbaud than upon the composer himself. In fact, it darts around quite a bit, between a performance class for young singers, thus very much ‘at home’ in the RCM, snippets from Rimbaud’s life, and a few from Britten’s. Correspondence and history are mined without any sense of pedantry. Quite what it all adds up to remained a little unclear to me; the effect was in a sense determinedly, if un-theoretically, post-modern. But the business of artistic creation and re-creation is rarely linear, so the fragments of history and interpretative wisdom we hear in the singing class suffer little and arguably gain a form of truth from their interspersal with scenes from Rimbaud’s ultra-bohemian existence, scenes that take us to Marseilles, Harar in Abyssinnia, Aden, Mons, London, and Paris. Verlaine comes and foes, even having a short family scene to himself, with his long-suffering wife, her mother, and a non-speaking part for the young Achille(-Claude) Debussy at the piano. Rimbaud’s defiant, excessive non-metropolitan personality – his northern-ness much commented upon here – contrasts with the diffident young Britten we glimpse from time to time, Auden and Isherwood attempting to bring him out of himself. Much is made of poet’s and composer’s sexuality, both in their scenes and in the class discussion, a running joke provided by one female student whose comment upon every aspect of the work is that it shows how ‘queer’ the text is. As a banal coda, she persuades a fellow female student to join her for a Marks and Spencer ready meal after the class: knowing banality, perhaps, but I am not sure what it added. Nor was I really convinced that we needed a spoken chorus of vowels, A, E, I, O, and U during a few of Rimbaud’s scenes; we gained a commendable sense of his linguistic interests in any case. Nevertheless, at seventy-five minutes, the play was enjoyable and certainly did not overstay its welcome.

Students in the performance class

 

Performances were assured, both in terms of acting and singing. Indeed for a group of young singers who are not primarily actors their stage presence was most impressive. (The 'movement' seemed largely unnecessary, though.) Peter Kirk threw himself wholeheartedly into the role of Rimbaud; Matthew Ward, Jerome Knox, and Nicholas Morton, all proved convincing in their snatches of Britten, Auden, and Isherwood. And so it went on: the students offered strong characterisation as well as some fine singing. Indeed, I could not name a weak link in the cast. As well as Les Illuminations, extracts performed here in Britten’s own piano reduction, we also heard from four Verlaine settings, Debussy’s Chevaux de bois, Vaughan Williams’s The Sky above the Roof, Fauré’s Spleen and Une Sainte en son aureole, and Britten’s The Journeying Boy (Hardy), from which the play takes its name. The single performance sold out, but the play will be performed again later in the year at the Guildhall School of Music. A visit is heartily recommended, save to the readily-shockable Daily Mail brigade, for whom ‘language’ and tone might prove a little much.