Wishing Arnold Schoenberg a very happy birthday...

... and showing, with a little, or rather a great deal of, help from one of his greatest interpreters, Michael Gielen, why Schoenberg's music will be forever young, forever new, forever strange yet familiar, just like that of his great forebears - and his great successors:







(Though whoever thought it was a good idea to split the third piece between two clips... Oh well!)

Goerner: Mozart, Schubert, and Schumann, 11 September 2013

Wigmore Hall

 

Mozart – Piano Sonata no.4 in E-flat major, KV 282/189g
Schumann – Kreisleriana, op.16
Schubert – Piano Sonata in B-flat major, D 960

Nelson Goerner (piano)

 

This was, as they say, a recital of two halves, Mozart and Schumann faring better than the admittedly enormous challenge of Schubert’s final piano sonata. It is certainly not the case, though, that the Mozart and Schumann works concerned, the E-flat sonata, KV 282/189g, and Kreisleriana, do not offer great challenges of their own; for the most part, Nelson Goerner rose more than creditably to them.

 

The first thing that struck me in the opening Adagio of the Mozart sonata was the sheer beauty of Goerner’s touch: an ‘old-fashoned’ virtue, perhaps, but an estimable one nonetheless. His performance sounded very slow – it is an Adagio, after all – but that was more a matter of what remains the shock of Mozart opening with a movement at such a tempo; intricate sub-division of the beat soon revealed that actually the pace was just as it should be. Structure was readily communicated, and Mozart’s harmonic surprises registered without undue exaggeration, readily integrated into an adventurous conception of form one would be more likely to ascribe to Haydn. The second movement minuets were pretty brisk and directed, without sounding too driven. It might have been of gracious benefit to relax for the second (Mozart marks it Minuet II rather than Trio), but the experimental nature of the composer’s writing continued to be communicated – and experienced. The finale, however, was not so impressive; it certainly had that definite ‘character’ of a finale, but was taken at such a speed that Goerner sometimes skated over detail.

 

By contrast, it was the first movement of Kreisleriana that proved relatively disappointing: brisk, fair enough, but also with a certain stiffness of tone, and driven apparently without mercy. The ‘poetic’, Eusebius-like central section fared much better, though, with far greater flexibility. A dreamy, rich-toned second movement continued to make amends. When ferocity came, it proved far more convincing, benefiting from a truly generative spring in the rhythm. Its successor movement was splendidly pianistic, not in any meretricious sense, but in its revelation as ‘piano music’, both words of that phrase equally apparent. It and the two movements that followed were undeniably Romantic, yet with a backbone that, with Brahms in mind, one might almost call Classical. Richness of tone was married successfully to delicacy of voicing. The grave, recitative-like beauty of the sixth movement, blossomed into arioso, even Lied, and of course into the piano fantasy of the seventh. There was a fine sense of destination to the finale, not so much in a sonata-like sense, as akin to the end of a song-cycle Schumann had yet to pen or indeed a set of Brahms fantasias. Mood swings were throughout observed, but were certainly not the only thing; there was real musical substance here too.

 

The first movement of Schubert’s sonata again suffered, like the last movement of the Mozart, from a degree of skating over; again, it seemed related to, though not entirely to be ascribed to, swiftness of tempo. Molto moderato was certainly not what I heard. This seemed a more typical first movement; whatever one might hear here, it should not really be ‘typical’ of anything. In this context, the first-time bar before the exposition repeat sounded more bizarre than unsettling. Both in this movement and the second, there was a sense of being rushed, albeit without rigidity; indeed, both proved somewhat diffuse and consequently felt lengthier than they probably were. Even that most extraordinary of modulations – yes, that one, which should utterly take one’s breath away – sounded relatively matter-of-fact. The scherzo was flighty, yet did not soar, even with a damaged wing. However, there was an intriguing sense of rhythmic kinship with other, more conventional Schubert scherzi (not least in his symphonic writing). The finale was, for the most part, beautifully played, give or take the odd instance of the music running away with itself, but I gleaned little sense of what was at stake, a criticism that might have been levelled at this Schubert performance as a whole.

Brief programme note for Wagner Preludes

(originally written for part of a programme note for the 2013 Salzburg Festival. Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra performed orchestral preludes and overtures by Wagner and Verdi, as well as two new works.)


Richard Wagner (1813–1886)
Prelude to Act One of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg


Not the least remarkable thing concerning the Prelude to Act One of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is when Wagner composed it, as he wrote in Mein Leben.

During a beautiful sunset which transfigured the light I contemplated a splendid view of “Mainz the Golden” and the majestic Rhine streaming past it, the prelude to my Meistersinger […] returned suddenly clear and distinct to my soul. I set about putting the prelude on paper and wrote it down precisely as it is in the score today, with all the main themes of the whole drama already definitively formed.  

In this Prelude, we hear five of the work’s principal motifs adumbrated, three of them combined in brazen contrapuntal mastery at the moment of return to the work’s deceptively wholesome and anything but straightforward C major tonality. That moment is famously, humorously, signalled by a triangle stroke. We are introduced to the Mastersingers, to Walther and his impetuous ardour and to the darker, contemplative, Schopenhauerian tendencies of the opera before the curtain rises – all before the music to which this overture apparently refers had been composed. Wagner’s counterpoint, like his character Walther von Stolzing, disregards tradition. Increasing reverence for Bach notwithstanding, this is no pastiche, nor even Brahmsian revival. Strauss and Mahler would admire Wagner’s practice for the same reason the reactionary theorist Heinrich Schenker would deplore it: themes are yoked together out of ‘dramatic’ rather than ‘purely musical’ necessity.

Richard Wagner (1813–1886)

Prelude to Act One of Parsifal

Parsifal is a markedly different from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Wagner’s unwieldy designation of Bühnenweihfestspiel (stage-festival-consecration-play) hints at its distance from anything redolent of the opera house. We no longer consider it desirable to restrict performances to Bayreuth, yet something of the mystery play remains. The first act Prelude prepares us admirably. In its opening bars, we hear presentiments of that love symbolized in Christ’s body given for us, of Amfortas’s fallen suffering, of the Grail (the ‘Dresden Amen’), and of that redemption whose substance provides the greatest of Parsifalian enigmas. Wagner summarized the progression to King Ludwig II as love, faith, hope. Moreover, as Theodor Adorno would observe, Parsifal exhibited both Wagner’s ‘late style’ and the ‘still disconcertingly new’; we stand but a stone’s throw from the opening Adagio of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. ‘Lugubrious dimming of sound’, as Adorno again describes, moves us closer still to Schoenberg. Brass-choir religiosity both suggests the church and has us, Amfortas-like in our agony, doubt whether its truths still hold. Some have wished to identify Parsifal as Christ; Wagner and we know that we cannot.

Mozart and the Voice: Past and Present

(originally published as a programme note for the 2013 Salzburg Festival)

 The subject of Mozart and the voice extends to almost everything he wrote, from his first vocal works for London in 1765 onwards. Thereafter Mozart’s experience and mastery of vocal composition would inform, even transform, his approach to every other genre. The F sharp minor Adagio of the Piano Concerto no. 23 in A major, KV 488, is inconceivable not only without the depths of feeling engendered by the contemporaneous opera Le nozze di Figaro, above all by the miracle of Shakespearean characterization that is the Countess, but also without Mozart’s mastery in vocal writing and embellishment, implicit and explicit. Mozart is fundamentally both a vocal and a dramatic composer in a way that the far more instrumentally-inclined Haydn is not.

From the sacred drama, Die Schuldigkeit des ersten Gebots, KV 35, and the first opera proper, Apollo et Hyacinthus, KV 38, questions are raised concerning voices and drama. What were the characteristics of particular voices for which he wrote? What were singers’ expectations and demands? How might they, human beings as well as voices, have inspired him? At one level those are historical questions, to which we may or may not have answers, and which may or may not inform our performing choices today. Take Apollo et Hyacinthus. We know that choirboys ranging from 12 to 17 took every part save that of King Oebalus, which was assumed by a 23-year-old theology student. Yet we are most likely puzzled upon turning to the score. Could such choristers really have sung those strenuous roles?

 

Aloysia Lange

If we draw a blank there, liberated even by the consequent need to think beyond the archives, our understanding of later vocal writing may be enriched by knowledge of particular singers. Aloysia Lange (née Weber), an early love of Mozart and later his sister-in-law, was straightforwardly the inspiration for two, probably three, concert arias, likewise two insertion arias for Pasquale Anfossi’s Il curioso indiscreto. Might knowledge or imagination of their turbulent relationship inform performance of ‘Popoli di Tessaglia’, KV 316? Aloysia’s range certainly encouraged Mozart to write the high coloratura. Reading Leopold Mozart tell of ‘the tender moments, the passage work, and embellishments, and high notes’ being ‘very delicate’ in the theatre demanding ‘great attentiveness and stillness on the part of the audience’, we may begin to engage in historical re-imagination extending beyond mere reconstruction. Upon discovery that Aloysia assumed the role of Constanze in the 1785 Vienna revival of Die Entführung aus dem Serail and played Donna Anna in the 1788 Viennese premiere of Don Giovanni, understanding of those roles may be altered too. Or should we only look to the roles’ creators? Might Donna Anna’s ‘Non mi dir’ be sung with greater delicacy, even inwardness, than we otherwise might expect? It is certainly worth trying.

Mozart was certainly put in his place by singers and had his hand forced. ‘Dalla sua pace’ from Don Giovanni owes its existence to the Vienna tenor, Francesco Morella, his voice less suited to the coloratura of the original Prague version’s ‘Il mio tesoro’, composed with Antonio Baglioni in mind. The 1791 contract between the Estates Theatre in the Bohemian capital and impresario Domenico Guardasoni for La clemenza di Tito made it clear that a primo musico (castrato) ‘of the first rank’, exemplified by named singers such as ‘Marchesini, or Rubinelli’, was of greater concern than ‘music by a distinguished composer’. Rendered subservient, Mozart then had to write for the cast with which he was presented at what was, even for him, breakneck speed.

Today, Mozart not so much puts current singers in their place as frees them. The human sympathy required to sing the Countess, for others to engage with her, is as valuable a gift as requisite cleanness and beauty of line. Again and again, singers, including those in this year’s International Mozarteum Summer Academy, tend their voices by ensuring a sufficiency of Mozart in varied vocal diets. Nevertheless, every musician, singer or instrumentalist, will tell you that Mozart is the most demanding taskmaster of all: he grants nowhere to hide.

Mozart’s Final Symphonic Triptych

(originally published as a programme note for a Salzburg Festival concert, 2013, in which the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle performed Mozart's final three symphonies) 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart  (1756–1791)

Symphony No. 39 in E-flat major KV 543

Adagio – Allegro

Andante con moto

Menuetto: Trio

Allegro

Symphony No. 40 in G minor KV 550

Molto allegro

Andante

Menuetto. Allegretto – Trio

Finale. Allegro assai

Symphony No. 41 in C major ‘Jupiter’ KV 551

Allegro vivace

Andante cantabile

Menuetto: Allegretto – Trio

Molto allegro

 

Programming, properly understood, is fun but difficult. Thoughtful performers have long taken it upon themselves to present music by Mozart and Schubert in tandem with works by composers of the Second Viennese School. All-Mozart programmes have become rarer than they should; opportunities to hear Mozart’s last three symphonies in sequence, a post-Romantic conception that would not have been his, are now infrequent. Yet, whilst we may draw comparisons and contrasts between them, perhaps even considering them alla Mahler as part of a greater meta-symphony – Simon Rattle has performed works by the Second Viennese trinity as such a ‘symphony’ – concentrated listening nevertheless continues to suggest, to eyes and to ears, tendencies pointing towards Mozart’s Austro-German successors (and back to Bach).

There remain surprising lacunae in our knowledge of Mozart’s life (not the least of temptations towards romanticizing). Little is known of the circumstances of composition and performance of these symphonies, in stark contrast to the acclaim received by the preceding ‘Prague’ Symphony. We know, even if we cannot quite believe the astonishing fact, that Mozart wrote all three within a six-week-period during the summer of 1788, yet have no certain evidence of performance. The old seductive idea that he therefore wrote them as a statement for posterity no longer garners acceptance. Perhaps they were written either for subscription concerts ‘in the Casino’ on Spiegelgasse in the centre of Vienna, which may or may not have taken place. The second version of the G minor symphony, without clarinets, suggests a particular performing imperative, perhaps for a 1791 Tonkünstler-Sozietät concert, at which Salieri conducted an unidentified Mozart symphony. Or they may have been written with a visit to London in mind. Posterity has nevertheless made them its own. Brahms, keen to distinguish between novelty and ‘inner value’, remarked in 1896 that, although Beethoven’s First Symphony had offered a ‘new outlook […] the last three symphonies by Mozart are much more important!’ That once-heretical judgement now sounds uncontroversial.

 

Unlike the famously minuet-less ‘Prague’, all three works are in four movements. The 39^th Symphony is the only one to follow on from the ‘Prague’, in having a slow introduction, its E-flat major grandeur presaging that of Die Zauberflöte, but all the opening movements are unsurprisingly in sonata form. Contrast between first and second groups remains an important guiding principle, yet so does dynamic propulsion, the tension between those principles providing part of an operatic, formal and musical drama. Indeed, the second group of the ‘Jupiter’ takes us unmistakeably into the realm of opera buffa, incorporating a quotation from Mozart’s insertion arietta Un bacio di mano (KV 541). It offers a perfect foil to the trumpets and drums of earlier material, replete with resonances of the traditional Missa solemnis and the seria pomp-to-come of La clemenza di Tito. Dramatic tension of a proto-Romantic order is overriding in the 40^th Symphony; its opening lower string throbbing presents an on-going scene of ‘accompaniment’ prior to the entry of the first subject above. Its nagging semitonal fall prepares us, if only slightly, for one of Mozart’s most disorienting chromatic explorations. The opening of the development shocks us by yanking first-group material into the remote key of F-sharp minor and then attempting, though not succeeding, its Mephistophelian negation through harmonic and contrapuntal means. Not for nothing was Schoenberg drawn to its analysis in his Harmonielehre.

 

Slow movements now carry greater emotional weight than had generally been Mozart’s symphonic practice, perhaps influenced by his piano concertos.  If the slow movement of Symphony No. 39 lacks a development section, at least as conventionally understood, that is only because development – hints of the ‘developing variation’ Schoenberg discerned in Brahms and his own music – continues throughout the recapitulation. All is transformed by what has come before. Chromaticism again haunts the slow movement of the fortieth symphony; if we are in the major mode, it is hardly at its most affirmative. Complexity, whether harmonic or formal, reaches a new level in the slow, sarabande-like movement of the ‘Jupiter’. It may not be lengthy but it is powerfully concentrated.

  

Minuets (and Trios) retain their origins in dance, though are entirely symphonic in conception.  There is certainly an aristocratic grandeur to the Minuet of No. 39 that would not have been out of place in Vienna’s Redoutensaal, yet its woodwind luxuriance marks it out as something more. The Trio transports us to a ravishing serenade-like Elysium, pointing towards Così fan tutte. Mozart’s G minor daemon drives home cross-rhythms in the 40^th Symphony that serve to demonstrate our distance from the ballroom. Perhaps most extraordinary of all is the chromaticism of the initially ‘simple’ if sinuous Minuet of the ‘Jupiter’. Ultra-chromatic subversion of the tonic results in a passage of just six beats which includes every pitch class save that of C. Yet however much that has us peer into the Schoenbergian future, Mozart’s chromaticism retains a great deal, though certainly not all, of its meaning by virtue of its relationship to a fundamental diatonic tonality. ‘Home’ remains a place to which Mozart returns, though who knows where a longer life might have taken him.

 

Thematic economy marks the E-flat major finale, the second theme a development of the first. The movement seems over in a flash, a quicksilver operatic resolution. Tragic complexity continues to rule in the G minor. One passage of chromatic and rhythmic disjuncture delineates a sequence of all eleven pitches, save for the tonic; this may in a sense be the most radical of all Mozart’s finales and meaning is again imparted partly through contrast between such exploration and the tonality of ‘home’, however uncomforting. In Georg Knepler’s words, this symphony ‘clings relentlessly to the minor mode’. It was, Knepler noted, not an unusual practice for Mozart, though Mozart’s other G minor masterwork, the String Quintet, KV 516, does turn to the tonic major. Tragedy is preferred over a Beethovenian-Romantic journey from ‘darkness to light’ or even the Classical dramatic happy ending. Mozart never confuses sentiment with sentimentality; catharsis shakes us to the core.

Simplicity and complexity

In his article on the Trio of the Symphony No. 40, Lenoard B Meyer argued that the belief to which he had earlier subscribed that ‘complexity was at least a necessary condition for value’, was ‘if not, entirely mistaken, at least somewhat confused’, since what was crucial in music, as exemplified by this Trio, was ‘relational richness, and such richness (or complexity) is in no way incompatible with simplicity of musical vocabulary and grammar’. He proceeded to argue that it was possible for the listener to discern the Trio’s complexities ‘precisely because these arise out of uncomplicated, unassuming tonal means’. Meyer was certainly right to point to that possibility, though the issue of ‘relational richness’ quite rightly complicates –in his sense as well as others – given that the ‘relative’ simplicity of the Trio’s ‘tonal means’ may be understood to acquire some of its meaning from its contrast with complexity elsewhere. There would not be a sense of relaxation were it not for the nigh Schoenbergian extremity of some of Mozart’s writing beforehand. Mozart’s compositional style, here and elsewhere, offers something quite extraordinary, akin to a dialectic in equilibrium, in which simplicity and complexity seem on the one hand to be held in balance and, on the other, dialectically to depend upon one another and to find themselves in dramatic conflict with each other. We may offer all manner of possible explanations for that. Mozart’s experience as an opera composer certainly informs his symphonic writing – sometimes to the chagrin of those who, like Wagner, wish that Mozart’s conception of sonata form had conformed more closely to expectations conditioned by Haydn and Beethoven. The composer’s historical position is another factor. The stage at which Mozart’s musical language finds itself is somewhat analogous to the world of Newtonian physics, then in its popular heyday, a tonal universe extending its bounds almost rationally, tonal relations, remote and close, almost yet not quite classifiable. And yet there remains a ‘progressive’ imperative, ineluctably urging him on towards chromatic dissolution.

Harmonic language is not the only element one may consider in such a fashion. One can learn a great deal from Mozart’s irregularity of phrase length. It is, however, perhaps the most important or at least the most readily apparent. Moreover, as with Schoenberg, the potential, if not yet the realization, of harmonic dissolution necessitated a more rigid form of musical organization. What could be more ‘organized’ than a fugue, or at least fugal writing, in the case of the finale of the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony fused with sonata form?

The sense of a finale offering the culminating achievement of the work, its telos or goal, is not the least of Mozart’s legacies. For the ‘finale problem’ experienced by Beethoven and every German Romantic symphonic composer – a good few non-Germans too – may, with a little exaggeration, find its origin in Mozart’s tour de force. A requirement of ‘Classical’ balance and the scope for throwaway finale humour – always more Haydn’s thing than Mozart’s – have been dealt a blow by a teleology throwing the greatest weight upon a climactic final movement. Lest that seem Romantic sentimentalism, there is a great deal of evidence to indicate that the finale of the ‘Jupiter’ was understood as such at the time. Vincent Novello would recount a conversation with Franz Xaver Mozart, Wolfgang’s son: ‘he considered the Finale to his father’s sinfonie in C – which [Johann Peter] Salomon [the impresario who commissioned Haydn’s London Symphonies] christened the Jupiter – to be the highest triumph of instrumental composition, and I agree with him.’ Complexity is triumphantly reinstated, if ever it had gone away, yet the coda’s quintuple invertible counterpoint – all the movement’s themes are combined in mind-boggling combination and permutation – is all the more miraculous for how lightly-worn the learning is. Yes, there is triumph, but there is no sense of forcibly welding the themes together (as, say, in Wagner’s Meistersinger counterpoint). Mozart’s finale is the product of an eighteenth-century art that conceals art, offering the apparent paradox of effortless climax.

Aspects of Wagnerian Love: Sister, Bride, Wife and Son

(originally published as a programme note to a Salzburg Festival Concert, August 2013: programme details below)

 

Richard Wagner (1813–1886)

Siegfried-Idyll in E major, WWV 103
Act One of Die Walküre, WWV 86 B

Springtime Passion: The Heat of the Moment

If ever there were an act taken from Wagner’s Ring one might elect to perform in isolation, arguably from his entire oeuvre, it would be the first act of Die Walküre. It ‘works’ by itself; although only an incurious soul would not to wish to know what happens next, you do not need Das Rheingold to make sense of it. That is not, of course, to say that knowledge of the ‘preliminary evening’ does not have one appreciating Die Walküre differently, more deeply. The very contrast of sound-worlds between the frigid realm of gods, dwarves and giants, in which the goddess of love, Freia, is little more than a cipher, and the world of what Wagner, in thrall to the ‘sensualist’ philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, called the ‘purely human’ is an implied part of the dramatic experience. Yet even the first-time listener will be drawn in by the Walküre tale of a brutalized woman falling in love with a mysterious outlawed visitor, the liberator in whom she will recognize herself and her true potential as a human being and who will likewise recognize himself in her. This is a Romantic journey from darkness to light, just as Wagner would have found in the archetypal musical example, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

With Wagner, tonal relations are more complex, arguably more equivocal, than in Beethoven. The Ring as a whole opens in E flat major, or rather it opens with that celebrated low E flat, from which even tonality itself seems to evolve, just as life itself may be understood to evolve from the Rhine in the Rheingold Prelude. Götterdämmerung concludes in D flat major, ‘flatter’ than the ‘natural world’ opening to the cycle, and indeed the key associated with the gods’ fortress of Valhalla. Yet the progression experienced in the first act of Die Walküre, if not quite so straightforward as that of Beethoven’s C minor to C major ‘narrative’, still brings with it a clear transformation, from the D minor of the Prelude’s extraordinary opening storm – Beethoven again a progenitor, not least in the Pastoral Symphony, though Wagner goes further in conceptual weight and arguably in sheer fury – to the blazing full orchestral triumph of G major as the curtain falls. That scorching climax, frankly erotic rather than metaphysically Beethovenian, occurs just in time in terms of stage action to spare prudish blushes as brother and sister cross the final frontier of mutual and self-exploration. Even then, however, we must register a qualification – opening and climax sharing a similarity of heroic Volsung defiance – in the flattened subdominant final chord that intensifies the dramatic excitement, yet hints at trouble in store.

Let us take a few steps back to the emergence of Siegmund from wild storm and dark forest. A proud example from Wagner’s line of charismatic heroes, he disdains bourgeois society as it disdains him: morally, politically – and violently. Like Parsifal, he stands so far outside civilization that he knows not even his name. He calls himself ‘Wehwalt’ (woeful) but only discovers his ‘true’ name, Siegmund (victorious protector), when his sister-bride bestows it upon him through love. Siegmund comes closer than most to the revolutionary Wagner wished himself to be. Marriage, forcible subjugation of Sieglinde as chattel by her thuggish husband, Hunding, is to be vanquished, on account both of its instantiation of bourgeois property rights and its thwarting the overpowering love Siegmund and Sieglinde discover in each other. Only later on, in Tristan und Isolde and in Götterdämmerung, do we discover that Romantic love is itself a form of power and thus equally to be suspected. We hear that from a beautiful heart-rending solo cello motif, voiced as water and Sieglinde refresh the fugitive visitor. It will develop into a fully blown theme of sexual love as their feelings develop: ‘Du bist der Lenz’ (you are the spring), Sieglinde will tell him. The emotional world conjured into being as liberation from the stern prison of emotional winter proves as vernal as anything Wagner wrote.

In the meantime, Hunding has returned home. According to customary laws of hospitality –Hunding is nothing if not conventional – the head of the household must offer shelter for the night. He distrusts his visitor, however, as he distrusts all novelty, and notes a suspicious kinship to Sieglinde; it is all in the eyes. It transpires that ‘Wehwalt’ is a foe of Hunding and his kin. Prefiguring his liberation of Sieglinde, ‘Wehwalt’ has rescued a child-bride forced by her family into a loveless marriage; the brothers who were slain are of Hunding’s clan. Though custom will constrain him this evening, Hunding announces his intention to avenge those deaths and the affront to patriarchy the following morning. Sieglinde drugs her tormentor and joins Siegmund, revealing the secret of the sword in the tree, awaiting a great hero. Siegmund’s father ‘Wälse’ – in reality, a disguised Wotan, roaming the human world in search of something ‘new’ – had promised him a sword that he would find ‘in höchster Not’ (in deepest need). The phallic symbolism of extraction is not subtle, nor should it be. Music and words emphasize Siegmund’s triumph: Siegmund the Volsung, you see, woman! As bridal gift he brings you this sword.’ (‘Siegmund, den Wälsung, siehst du, Weib! Als Brautgabe bringt er dies Schwert.’) The final revelation comes with Sieglinde’s recognition in Siegmund of the brother from whom she has long been separated. In defiance of the bourgeois morality of Hunding and his protectress, Fricka – Wagner, in a letter, derided her as the voice of mere ‘custom’ – Siegmund takes his twin as ‘bride and sister ’ (‘Braut und Schwester’). Thus will the blood of the Volsung race flourish (inspiring Thomas Mann initially unpublished 1906 novella Wälsungenblut).

Jeannine Altmeyer (Sieglinde) and Peter Hoffmann (Siegmund) Sieglinde and Siegmund in Patrice Chéreau's classic Bayreuth 'centenary' production of Die Walküre

Though one might deem this a tragedy considered in full – Carl Dahlhaus wrote of ‘the tragedy of the incestuous love of Siegmund and Sieglinde’ – and it is certainly true that both parties ultimately meet their death rather than enjoy or endure a ‘happy marriage’, ‘tragic’ is not how it feels. There is greatness in Siegmund’s subsequent rejection of Valhalla and immortality because Sieglinde will not be admitted; that greatness is born not only in his character but also in the transformative quality of the Volsungs’ love. Shocking experience of that very same quality will initiate Brünnhilde’s transformation from steely, inhuman Valkyrie to ‘purely-human’ woman. When, moreover, we come in the second act to Siegmund’s death, we understand it in the light of that love’s blazing conviction. A thoroughgoing anarchist in matters of love as well as politics, indeed a political thinker who recognized their inextricable interrelation, Wagner insisted that nothing endured for ever. Such, we discover in the Prologue to Götterdämmerung, had been Wotan’s error, to inscribe treaties as runes upon his spear, attempting to render eternal that which could only have had temporary validity. So it is for Wagner, the Dresden comrade-in-arms of Mikhail Bakunin and student of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Who knows what might happen to Siegmund and Sieglinde in old age? The very idea seems preposterous. Indeed, when, in the subsequent generation, Brünnhilde attempts to perpetuate her union with Siegfried beyond its natural life, tragedy ensues. Wagner captures the Volsungs’ springtime passion in all its immediacy, its immanence – always a primary concern to Wagner who, as a student of Young Hegelianism, stood determined to bring heaven down to earth. There is no Hans Sachs here, ready to counsel the youthfully impetuous that they need plan further ahead.

Foolhardy, indeed doomed, in the face of societal opposition though their love might be, what matters is the here and now; what matters in retrospect is the there and then. When Wotan returns in the second act, he will be weighed down by reflection, by consequences, whereas Siegmund and Sieglinde do not reflect, they simply act. Theirs is the Young Hegelian ‘Philosophie der Tat’ (philosophy of action) or of ‘the deed’. It may not be a ‘solution’ to the world’s problems. As Wagner discovered, the more he thought about it, the further away that seemed, hence his immersion in the ‘pessimistic’ philosophy of Schopenhauer, which he nevertheless declined to accept wholesale. The Volsungs’ deeds nevertheless thrill and inspire, especially in the white heat of the moment.  

Autumnal Progeny: A Return to the Symphony?

The flourishing of Volsung blood will find its fruit in Siegfried, born of Sieglinde at the moment of her death. We encounter the younger hero in Siegfried and, at a certain remove in the Siegfried-Idyll, or, to grant it its full dedicatory title Tribschen Idyll with Fidi-Birdsong and Orange Sunrise as Symphonic Birthday Greeting Offered to his Cosima by her Richard, 1870 – and one thought Hans Sachs’s christening of the Meistersinger melody, ‘selige-Morgentraum Deutweise’, lacked catchiness. Siegfried Wagner was born in June 1869, whilst work on the draft of Siegfried, from which the thematic material of the Idyll is taken, was completed the following month. Two sons, Wagner’s and the Volsungs’, thereby became intertwined in family mythology (though both would fail to meet unrealistic expectations).  We can smile at the marked contrast between the bourgeois family idyll, Cosima’s divorce from Hans von Bülow notwithstanding, the Wagners had created and the memory of Wagner’s anarchistic attacks upon that self-same thing. Or we can simply enjoy for what it is Wagner’s finest instrumental work: performed on that Tribschen Christmas Day as chamber music, yet conceived, as the autograph score attests, as a ‘symphony’.

Tribschen

Wagner was too hard upon some of his other instrumental efforts, yet he knew the value of this ‘symphony’ in modified sonata form, founded not so much upon Beethovenian dialectics as an idea of development rooted in musico-dramatic ‘endless melody’. Cosima recorded the following thoughts in her diary on on 30 August 1877:

He plays me the sonata for Math[ilde] Wesendonck and laughs heartily at its 'triviality'. […] He says he has never been able to write an occasional piece – this sonata is shallow, nondescript, the Albumblatt for Betty Schott is artificial; only with the Idyll had he been successful, because in that everything came together.

This lullaby of peace, joy and world-inheritance, to employ the conventional leitmotif references from the opera, may be our key to imagining those post-Parsifal ‘symphonies’ Wagner often envisaged, yet was never granted time to write. It seems they might have stood closer to Liszt than Bruckner, let alone Brahms.

 

From Bayreuth to Leipzig: Wagner returning home for his 200th anniversary

(a paper originally given at the OBERTO conference: Staging Operatic Anniversaries, at Oxford Brookes University, 10 September 2013)

 

Many in Wagner’s generation and in more than one generation before him found themselves preoccupied with the question, ‘What is German?’ A celebrated epigram by Schiller had begun by asking: ‘Germany? Where is it? I don’t know how to find it.’  Wagner himself essayed the question more than once, whether as a particular focus or as one amongst several. Much Wagner scholarship has, however, suffered from insufficient appreciation of that question’s nineteenth-century context and specifically of Wagner’s Saxon inheritance. His upbringing in Leipzig and Dresden, in the ‘third Germany’ that was neither Prussia nor Austria, profoundly informed his understanding of things ‘German’.

 

Transformed by Napoleon from an electorate into a useful allied kingdom in 1806, Saxony had the misfortune to emerge from the 1813 – that is the year of Wagner’s birth – Battle of Leipzig on the losing side. Most Saxon troops defected to the allied forces; King Frederick Augustus I was imprisoned; the state itself seemed imperilled, Saxony proving the great loser from the German states at the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna. Though Prussia failed to absorb her entirely, the rump of the Wettin kingdom held but three-quarters of the territory of the new Prussian province of Saxony. As Germans, looking askance at recent French cultural and political domination, increasingly wished for some form of national unification, questions arose: in what form and under whose aegis? Would there be popular unification founded upon a national movement, as desired by many of the 1848-9 revolutionaries, Kapellmeister Wagner in Dresden included, or a traditional power-political aggrandizement by one or both of the two great German powers? And where would that leave other German states, members of the so-called 'third Germany,' such as Saxony and Bavaria?

 

When Wagner, then, came to advise Ludwig II, he was informed by earlier experience. Wagner remained hostile to many of the other German princes, whose lamentable rule he held responsible for Germany’s sorry historical state, yet suspicion of Prussia, a ‘barracks state’ for many other Germans, always formed a crucial part of his outlook. The contrast, however exaggerated, between Prussian militarism and other states’ – Bavarian, Saxon, etc. – cultural achievement was a mainstay of discourse within those states. ‘Nationalism’ involved many competing strands.

 

Moreover, though one does not necessarily associate Wagner later in life with Saxony – indeed, amnesty permitted him to return to the other German states before his own – we find him in Leipzig, publicly and otherwise, more often than we might suspect. He conducted in 1862 at the old Gewandhaus the first performance of the Prelude to Act One of Die Meistersinger. Nietzsche wrote to his friend, Erwin Rohde, of attempts to effect a first encounter: Wagner was staying with relatives in Leipzig, unbeknown to the press. When they met, Nietzsche was enchanted by Wagner’s reading from his biography, Mein Leben, a scene from his Leipzig student days and observed, not for the last time, Wagner’s fondness for the local dialect.

 

In an essay from the mid-1860s, unpublished until 1878, the very question’ What is German’, ‘Was ist deutsch?’ is asked in its title. Just as, in Die Meistersinger, Hans Sachs proclaims that holy German art will endure, no matter what political calamity might befall the Holy Roman Empire, so Wagner now chooses the forlornly French-periwigged Bach as epitome of the German spirit, his music triumphing despite both his wretched, unrecognized existence as choirmaster and organist, and Germany’s catastrophic political fortunes. (Lutheran-Bachian chorales loom large in the Meistersinger score, likewise neo-Bachian counterpoint. Indeed, unreal anachronism, like that of the German nation itself. is built in to the work, since it provides Wagner’s reinvention of eighteenth-, not sixteenth-century counterpoint.)

 

Subsequent generations have often striven to dissolve Wagner’s ambiguities. National Socialism provides perhaps the most flagrant example, though it is far from alone. When Thomas Mann challenged hardening nationalist orthodoxy by presenting a more interesting, complex Wagner in a 1933 address, ‘Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner’, he was rebuked in an indignant ‘Protest by the Richard Wagner City Munich,”’which spoke on behalf of a ‘national restoration of Germany … [having] taken on definite form.’ Though signatories, including Richard Strauss, Hans Knappertsbusch, and Hans Pfitzner, were not all National Socialists, they were complicit in at best a simplification of Wagner’s person and ideas. Such elision of Wagner with Nazi goals has continued to haunt Wagner scholarship and reception into the twenty-first century. The Bavarian anti-Reich Wagner of ‘What is German?”, let alone the Saxon universalist, would surely have objected.

 

And so, when, after the Second World War, the Wagner city of Munich and Wagner adoptive temple of Bayreuth seemed to many hopelessly compromised, one might have expected Leipzig to step forward as an alternative. Matters were of course complicated by the political division of Germany into East and West. Both were suspicious in their different ways, but the East Germans were – perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not – often reluctant to enlist a fellow socialist into their roll call. Maybe Wagner was too hot to handle, too wilful; maybe some even heeded Marx’s unfair dismissal, when answering, at the time of the opening Bayreuth Festival in 1876, the persistent question, ‘What do you think of Wagner?’: highly characteristic of the ‘New German-Prussian empire-musicians’. That is, he was of Bismarck’s party, when little could have been further from the truth.

 

Herz's Gotterdammerung (1976)

On the one hand, the Leipzig Opera, reborn in a new house in the Augustusplatz, opened in 1960 with a performance of Die Meistersinger. (It would also mark the fiftieth anniversary of its reopening with a new production of the same work.) And in the 1950s, there were more Wagner performances in the East than in the West. On the other hand, Beethoven, for instance, especially the Beethoven of the Ninth Symphony, seemed a safer German ‘humanist’ master – and then there were of course the ‘other’ Leipzig composers: Bach, Mendelssohn, even Schumann, despite the fact that none of them was born in the city.  Moreover, if the opera house opened with Joachim Herz’s Meistersinger, it waited until 1973 for Herz’s Ring – though its role, predating Patrice Chéreau’s 1976 production, in making Wagner’s myth very much of the nineteenth century and its political, social, and economic conditions should never be underestimated. (Sadly, it often is.) Until recently, however. a visitor to the city’s streets would see little of Wagnerian interest, whereas it would be difficult to miss Bach and Mendelssohn. The birth house was pulled down in 1886, and other places in which his family lived – they were rarely in one place for long – met the same fate either then or during Allied bombing in 1943-4.

Interestingly, however, that has been changing, not least in preparation for the bicentenary. A new statue, the competition won by sculptor Stephan Balkenhof, has been erected, funds notably coming from private subscription rather than from the state or municipality. Balkenhof was faced with the specified task of integrating an unrealised conception from a century earlier, by Max Klinger, the end result thus incorporating an aspect of Leipzig’s ambivalent Wagner reception as well as a clear, downsizing attempt, very much of our time, to render Wagner the young man just that, rather than a towering nineteenth-century Romantic genius.  Musically, Leipzig has distinguished itself by staging Wagner’s three ‘early’ operas. Earlier this year, I saw Die Feen, which Bayreuth, in its co-production of those three works, somewhat mystifyingly elected to perform only in concert, thus ceding something of its position as Wagnerstadt. It was one of the two most significant Wagner stagings I have so far seen this year, the other coming from the Mozartstadt of Salzburg, in Stefan Herheim’s new production of Die Meistersinger, a rare Wagner outing for the summer festival: the first time that particular work had been seen there since the 1930s, and itself, along with Herheim’s Parsifal and Lohengrin a truly outstanding attempt to grapple with Wagner’s place in German history.




A scene from Herheim's Meistersinger: © Salzburger Festspiele / Forster

 

 

Die Feen, never performed in Wagner’s lifetime, was intended for the Leipzig opera, though much of it was written in Würzburg – the Wagnerian contest between Bavaria and Saxony thus receiving a miniature dramatisation of its own, further complicated by Würzburg’s Franconian status as a very recent acquisition by Munich. It would eventually be staged in Munich in 1888, five years after the composer’s death, a production that received numerous repeat performances; thereafter, stagings and concert performances alike have proved at best sporadic. The first Leipzig performance took place in 1938, as part of the city’s celebrations for Wagner’s 125th birthday.

 

It is a splendid work, at times perhaps ‘immature’, yet far superior to a number of works, even oeuvres, that bafflingly continue to hold the operatic stage. For the Wagnerite, and indeed for those with any interest in musical history, there is considerable additional pleasure to be derived from the parlour game of identifying both the many influences upon the work and the ways in which it offers a true starting point for Wagner’s subsequent explorations. According to Wagner, writing in Mein Leben:

While I had written [the incomplete, preceding work] Die Hochzeit without operatic embellishments and treated the material in the darkest vein, this time I festooned the subject with the most manifold variety: beside the principal pair of lovers I depicted a more ordinary couple and even introduced a coarse and comical third pair, which belonged to the operatic convention of servants and ladies’ maids. As to the poetic diction and the verses themselves, I was almost intentionally careless about them. I was not nourishing my former hopes of making a name as a poet; I had really become a ‘musician’ and a ‘composer’ and wanted simply to write a decent libretto, for I now realized nobody else could do this for me, inasmuch as an opera book is something unique unto itself and cannot be easily brought off by poets and literati.

 

And so of course, it would continue, Wagner furnishing all of his own musico-dramatic texts, even if in this instance he reworks – perhaps too modest a verb – Carlo Gozzi. One may trace a multitude of other continuities or presentiments, not least the idea of the forbidden question, albeit the other way round from Lohengrin, at least in terms of gender: Ada, the half-fairy, half-mortal, has agreed to marry Arindal, the King of Tramond, with the condition that he never ask her who she is. Die Feen, however, is no tragedy; for, after inevitably having asked the question, having therefore seen Ada disappear, and having followed her to the underworld, where, Orpheus-like (surely a tribute to Wagner’s beloved Gluck?), he restores her to life with voice and lyre, Arindal gains immortality and joins Ada in the land of the fairies. The trials Arindal must undergo both recall The Magic Flute and presage Die Frau ohne Schatten. That is not, of course, to say that Die Feen itself is a crucial link between Mozart and Strauss – though Wagner certainly is, and Strauss actually served as assistant conductor for that Munich premiere – but rather to remind ourselves that so many of the ideas on which dramatists draw are part of common currency, especially when dealing with ‘what is German’, not least the resolutely unsentimental fairytale..

 

I could happily continue with respect to the ‘dramatic’ content, yet ought at least briefly to say something in similar vein, if equally selective, about the music. For instance, there is a second-act figure that naggingly anticipates Tristan, and the choral writing certainly at times looks forward to Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. Looking back, Weber, Marschner, and only slightly less, Beethoven and Mendelssohn loom large in the general music language, this being a more unalloyed ‘German’ opera than either of its two immediate successors, Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi, though the Italian and French influences upon those works have often been exaggerated. In any case, the broader point is that, for Wagner at this time, standing firmly in a dominant tradition of eighteenth-century German aesthetics, perhaps the key to understanding ‘German art’ was its power of synthesis, overcoming merely ‘national’ styles to progress, in his later Zurich ‘reform’ language, toward the universal.

 

Copyright: Kirsten Nijhof. Christiane Libor (Ada), Arnold Bezuyen (Arindal)

In this staging by director Renard Doucet, metatheatricality is worn lightly, humorously, yet tellingly. Following a Saturday evening modern German family meal, the father tunes in to a live broadcast of Die Feen from the Leipzig Opera. (A nice touch is his turning up the volume for the Overture as the conductor does similarly in the pit.) The rest of the family departs, leaving him in peace to listen. Music becomes the key to the work as a whole; it enlists his emotions, transforms his understanding. In something of a modern fairytale, his living room becomes the performance space, not entirely unlike the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann. What might seem a counterpart to all-too-comfortable Biedermeier home life soon has its tensions exposed – Wagner perhaps issuing the challenge from which his home city had sometimes recoiled, whether in the 1830s, the GDR, or even more recently. Yet ambivalence remains; has Wagner disrupted proceedings, or has he himself been disrupted? Although the paterfamilias – at best a weak example of the type – welcomes back his wife at the end of the broadcast, and leaves Ada to the fairies, a beret-clad Wagner included, will he tire of his quotidian existence and hanker again after the immortality of that other world, that to which, as Arindal, he had exceptionally been admitted?

 

Ulf Schirmer’s conducting of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra proved well-judged. Early Romantic influences were apparent, but so, as in the staging, were hints – and sometimes rather more than hints – of what was to come. A phrase here or there might be ever so slightly underlined, or so I fancied, to alert one to a similarity with a phrase in Lohengrin, and indeed beyond. More importantly, the straining even at this stage towards through-composition was readily apparent, without entirely undermining the ‘number’ structure of this Romantic opera. The dark, typically old ‘German’ sonorities of the Gewandhaus Orchestra – so different, for instance, from the more homogenised, ‘international’ Berlin Philharmonic, of Karajan’s vintage, let alone Rattle’s – helped ‘place’ it within a recognisable tradition.

 

In performing this work – and performing it in such a fashion, both on stage and in the pit –  Leipzig took one step further towards reconciliation with its greatest son. This may not have been the intention, but perhaps we should also take this opportunity at least partly to shift our attention from Wagner’s later life, as focused upon places such as Munich and Bayreuth, to his earlier years, not least so that we might construct a richer, more complex picture of what it meant – and means – for Wagner and his music to be German.

Prom 68: Skride/Oslo PO/Petrenko - Tchaikovsky, Szymanowski, and Rachmaninov, 2 September 2013

 

Royal Albert Hall

Tchaikovsky – Symphony no.1 in G minor, op.13, ‘Winter Daydreams’ (revised version, 1874)

Szymanowski – Violin Concerto no.1, op.35
Rachmaninov – Symphonic Dances, op.45

Baiba Skride (violin)

Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra

Vasily Petrenko (conductor)

 

Some rather odd programming here. I am the last person to say that we should revert to the ‘bad old days’ of wall-to-wall overture-concerto-symphony concerts, but in this case, it might well have proved more coherent. Not that reworking of the programming would necessarily have rescued Tchaikovsky’s hapless ‘Winter Daydreams’ Symphony. I suppose it is worth giving such works occasional outings, if only to remind us why they are not more often performed, but when there is such a host of fine music that continued to languish in (concert, if not always recorded) obscurity, do we really need a Proms Tchaikovsky symphonic cycle?

 

Vasily Petrenko and the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra – despite, or because of the considerable number of female musicians in its ranks? – nevertheless did their best by the work. It opened with wonderfully alert, lively playing, perhaps especially from the woodwind section, whose colours veritably shimmered. Petrenko imparted a strong developmental sense to the music, if at times his reading sounded rather driven. (Tchaikovsky marks this first movement Allegro tranquillo, though what that might mean in practice is anyone’s guess.) It was enjoyable enough if ultimately quite lacking in structural coherence. The slow movement was songful, the Oslo woodwinds again offering especial delight: solo oboe (David Friedemann Strunck) first among equals, though the other lines gathering around his were in no sense inferior. Yet the movement soon began to outstay its welcome, not helped by the bizarre outburst from the horns (again, a criticism of the work, not its performance). The third movement came across with the proper character of a scherzo: often delicate, but with definite rhythmic drive; the trio evinced Romantic longing with considerable conviction. As for the finale, there was a splendidly lugubrious build up to what ultimately is little more than an incoherent succession of devices, contrapuntal writing in particular sounding quite unmotivated by the material. It was played with relish, but really...

 

What a relief then it was to turn after the interval to Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto. Its single movement – a span concealing, or rather revealing, a multitude of sins – opened as if recollecting Dukas’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice, before Baiba Skride’s sinuous, erotically-charged violin line emerged as if from within. Tone was clean yet inviting, and could become richer when required, especially when playing sul G. (Again, I could not help but wonder how our unreconstructed conductor could maintain his concentration, yet somehow he managed.) The discontinuities that ultimately are continuities of Szymanowski’s radical form emerged just as strongly as Tchaikovsky’s forlorn attempts at coherence. Purpose was present throughout. Yes, the music is perfumed, yet that it is only a small aspect of the composer’s writing, revel though we do – and did – in the post-Debussyan, post-Straussian, and yes, post-Schoenbergian harmonies and colours. Petrenko shaped the great orchestral climaxes surely, but it was the silvery violin and delicate woodwind that lingered longest in the mind. Not, of course, that the violin does not have its more energetic, incisive moments, and they were splendidly despatched. Above all, there was a true sense of directed fantasy from all.

 

The last time I had heard Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances had been in a typically slapdash effort from Valery Gergiev. If the programming on this occasion were a little unsatisfactory, it nevertheless helped Rachmaninov more than Gergiev’s placing him after twelve-note Schoenberg had. It is difficult not to think a work such as this, written in 1940, a little retrograde – and not in the Bachian sense Schoenberg would have had in mind. Yet here at least Rachmaninov’s music was able to resound with integrity, ironically sounding far more a statement of exile than it had in Gergiev’s LSO series, allegedly organised around the idea of ‘exile’. One heard the composer grappling in so many senses with a New World: remaining himself and yet adapting, reluctantly or otherwise, to some aspects of modernistic common currency. Petrenko offerd a first movement as alert as anything we had heard so far, rhythm and colour once again equally to the fore. The saxophone solo offered not our last recollection of Ravel. If there were times when a little more orchestral weight might not have gone amiss, especially in the developmental music, Petrenko and his players offered in general a good balance between heart and wit. That balance was also well struck in the second movement, whose waltz music benefited from a gorgeous lilt. It was nicely elliptical too, no easy answers being offered. A life-long obsession with the Dies irae chant sounded genuinely revisited, refreshed, in the finale: a different variety of dance, yet a dance nonetheless. And, whatever one’s opinions about the backward-looking nature of Rachmaninov’s music, the ending, unlike that to Tchaikovsky’s symphony, convinced.