Brian Elias: Piano Trio (world premiere) Schubert: Piano Trio no.2 in E-flat major, D 929
Jane Gordon (violin)
Victoria Simonsen (cello)
Jan Rautio (piano)
Written in five relatively short, interconnected movements (Allegro-Lento-Presto-Adagio-Presto), Brian Elias’s Piano Trio makes for an impressive addition to the repertoire. If the composer seemed very much at home in the medium, the players seemed equally at home in his idiom. The Rautio Piano Trio certainly gave this world premiere as if they had lived some time with this music and its possibilities. An arresting opening, angular and lyrical, for all three instruments, seemed even on a first hearing to set up ideas and possibilities for the rest of the work. Not that that material is simply repeated; rarely did it seem to appear in quite the same guise. Rather, it is varied, transformed, and above all developed: in melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic terms. Here we heard a composer comfortable with roots in tradition, without in any sense being hidebound by it or otherwise backward-looking. Both work and performance imparted a strong sense of every note counting, of being made to count; for this sounded as a case of material being shaped, even mastered, as sculpture in sound. As Webern once put it, ‘To develop everything … from one principal idea! That is the strongest unity … But in what form? That is where art comes in!’ Freedom, as we must seemingly constantly remind ourselves and others, is not licence. Perhaps this is to indulge in undue anachronism, but it seemed to me there was indeed something of a Second Viennese School rigour and/of expression beneath the surface. The central Presto movement bears some resemblance to a Classical scherzo and trio, without necessarily ‘being’ such a movement; yet it also springs from and leads to the two slow movements that flank it. It is, moreover, in that ongoing transformation of musical figures that both some degree of formal symmetrical balance and thoroughgoing development occur—and are felt to occur.
It took my ears a minute or so to adjust to the greater expansiveness and, at least in this performance, greater lightness of Schubert’s E-flat makor Piano Trio. The first movement did not lack sterner, darker passages, nor Schubertian Sehnsucht when called for, but its initial mood was, rightly, quite different. Maybe it was hearing this music in the light of Elias’s new work, but the Rautio Piano Trio seemed unusually attentive to thematic transformation in Schubert’s writing too. At any rate, the sadness that is rarely too far from the surface of Schubert’s music began more strongly to register as the music developed (that is, not only in the development section). The paradoxical combination of lightness of tone and onward trudge in the opening of the Andante con moto was well judged. If I sometimes missed a greater sense of tension later on in that movement, the tragedy of its close held the attention in arresting manner. The apparent insouciance of the scherzo is just that, of course: apparent. The players being wise enough not to opt for one side or the other, that ambiguity was well served here. So too was the qualification in Schubert’s marking for the finale, ‘Allegro moderato’. A spacious account that was not slow but rather unhurried, permitted detail to emerge throughout, often in telling fashion.
Couperin:Pièces de clavecin, Book III: 18e Ordre Brahms: Piano Sonata no.3 in F minor, op.5
Angela Hewitt (piano)
Images: Ilme Vysniauskaite
Taking as its theme the fifteenth-century English word, ‘respair’, the recovery of hope following a period of despair, the 2021 Waterloo Festival offers much of that desperately sought-after quality, not least the return of Anthony Friend’s Spotlight Chamber Concerts series, so cruelly cut short last December. Twice postponed, a recital by Angela Hewitt, originally conceived as a farewell to Beethoven Year (‘Geh, Hoffnung’) now offered music by Couperin and Brahms to a socially distanced audience of about 150 people. That in itself surely offered grounds for respair.
To the uninitiated, Couperin and Brahms might seem a strange combination. Brahms was of course a crucial figure in nineteenth-century revival of early music. He knew Bach’s cantatas intimately; it would be difficult to overstate the importance of Bach’s music for his own. Handel loomed large too: Brahms provided written out continuo parts (on piano) for an entire volume of Handel’s Italian duets and trios, gave the Vienna premiere of Saul in 1873, and the German Requiem speaks for itself. Brahms’s work with older German masters such as Isaac, Schütz, and Buxtehude likewise informed both concert life and his own writing. Brahms’s political nationalism—whatever some may tell you, far less tenuous than Wagner’s—notwithstanding, his musical inclinations were more generous. Advocacy for the keyboard music of Couperin, both as pianist and as ‘editor’ (it seems Friedrich Chrysander did much of the hard work in Brahms’s name), was, if more surprising, no less genuine. Clara Schumann declared herself baffled by Brahms’s interest in something that was ‘really of little interest musically’, yet Elaine Kelly makes a persuasive case for influence on some of Brahms’s later piano music. The Third Piano Sonata does not, of course, fall into that category. And whilst it would doubtless be fascinating to hear an attempted recreation, or at least reimagination, of Brahms’s performing style for Couperin, this was not attempted here. Nor, however, was this one of those perverse attempts to have the piano sound like the harpsichord. (Clue: it never will. If you want the harpsichord, play or listen to the harpsichord.)
Here we heard the 1722 eighteenth ordre, finally balanced between F major and minor—and thus preparing the way for the tonality of Brahms’s sonata. The opening allemande, ‘La Verneüil’ spoke with an occluded freedom very much of our moment. In Hewitt’s hands, it rightly took its time, but it (or rather she) knew where it was heading: respair, one might say. ‘La Verneüilléte’, presumably presenting the daughter of the previously evoked Duke of Bourbon, offered a more wilful obstinacy—make of that what you will—born of, yet extending beyond, its courtly idiom. In the rich melancholy of ‘Sœur Monique’, the acoustic vibration of Couperin’s ornaments in Francis Bedford’s church, proved part and parcel of its magic. Indeed as so often, ‘ornaments’ seemed quite the wrong word. ‘Le turbulent’, bright and busy, and the necessary contrast of ‘L’atendrissante’, all the more lugubrious on the piano, led to a delightful, dexterous musical box of a performance for the celebrated ‘Le tic-toc-choc’. There was finally an almost childlike delight to be had in the boisterous obstinacy, allied to that of ‘La Verneüilléte’, yet unquestionably different in character, in ‘Le gaillard-boiteux’.
Hand on heart, I am yet to be won over by any of Brahms’s three piano sonatas, all of them early works. Never say never, though, and it is quite possible that this performance will have edged me a little closer. There was no denying the captivating quality to the first movement’s contrast: tumultuous opening, soon scaled down to prophetic half-lights—far from solely the province of the composer’s late years—in a dialectic of tragic virtuosity. Hewitt captured well the Classicism with which the young composer already distinguished himself from Schumann: more than mere framing, though certainly that too. The ‘Andante espressivo’, to my ears more ingratiating, was sung without sentimentality and with clear direction, reflexively exulting in its material possibilities. If the Scherzo is giant, it is not elephantine; it sounded as serious, yet not so grim, as Chopin’s scherzi, in a reading plentiful in chiaroscuro. We heard more of the notes than there is any reasonable ground to expect. The pathos of a young Romantic already somewhat out of his time was readily, winningly apparent in the Intermezzo. The finale showed debts to Beethoven and Schumann if not settled then at least recognised and addressed.
For like so much else right now, they offer but a starting point, the future more uncertain than ever. In that spirit, Hewitt’s encore reignited our immanent sense of respair. Mary Howe’s transcription of Bach’s ‘Sheep may safely graze’ proved, perhaps inevitably, the most immediately moving music of all. Possessed both of dignity and of a freedom that comes of abiding acquaintance, it felt like meeting an old friend in fine new clothes. Where Bach remains, all is not lost.
Atalanta – Samantha Louis-Jean Meleagro – Harriet Eyley Climene – Lisa Howarth Asteria – Lucy Anderson Narrator – Rosa French
CHROMA
Robert Howarth (conductor)
La corona: Bampton Classical Opera certainly selected a title for our times. However, the English translation under which it was promoted, The Crown, not only has televisual contemporary resonance, but reminds us that every crown, though arguably a misfortune, is not quite a sign of a deadly virus. Not that the eighteenth century, at least until its close, saw things that way. In Europe, at least, monarchies seemed the height of modernity, the path to the future. The old prize of universal monarchy retained currency, albeit in conflict with more novel notions of the balance of power. Those few republics remaining were ailing, unlikely models for human flourishing. And at the centre of Europe remained the Holy Roman Empire and Habsburg monarchy, recently separated yet now once again reunited under Francis (Stephen) I and Maria Theresa.
This was the last of the dozen Metastasio libretti the Vienna court poet named ‘azione teatrale’: that is, a serenata, with definite action and to be staged. We should not get too hung up on the term, more a vague description than a genre; it is difficult to say why, say, L’isola disabitata (as set by Haydn, among many others) and Il sogno di Scipione (as set by many before Mozart, and at least one after him) should be considered such and other, similar works should not, let alone why the Orfeo of Calzabigi and Gluck, quite un-Metastasian, should originally have received that designation.
Gluck’s music, now lost, for an Iphigenia in Aulis ballet, first written for the Imperial Castle at Laxenburg, had been given once more a few months later at Innsbruck for the 1765 wedding of the Archduke Leopold (later Leopold II) to Infanta Maria Luisa (who later notoriously dismissed Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito as ‘una porcheria tedesca’). Having left the theatre at its conclusion, Francis suffered a fatal stroke in his carriage. The theatres closed and the azione teatrale in preparation for Francis’s name-day, in performance by a quartet of his daughters (the Archduchesses Maria Elisabeth, Maria Amalia, Maria Josepha, and Maria Carolina), went unperformed until a 1966 Austrian radio broadcast. Staging had to wait until 1987, in Schönbrunn’s Salon de Bataille, where Gluck’s premiere would have taken place.
The present performance, however, was given in concert, like the British premiere, also from 1987, slightly earlier, at the City of London Festival. In place of secco recitatives, we had a linking English narration. Having drawn inevitable reference to the other ‘corona’, it clearly told us where we were, what was going on, and sketched a broader mythological and literary context, lightly yet learnedly allusive. Context, that is, to the slight tale of who should take credit for the Calydonian boar hunt: ultimately neither Atalanta nor her sister, Climene, neither Princess Asteria nor or Prince Meleagro, but the goddess Diana. It culminates in bestowal of the crown of laurels on the keen royal huntsman Francis. Rosa French delivered her narration with elegance and wit.
The music is fresh, in many respects glorious, certainly well deserving of greater acquaintance, though this is no drama in the sense of the ‘reformist’ Gluck. (Nor was it intended to be.) Robert Howarth’s direction from the harpsichord of CHROMA was forthright and unfussy, well judged in balance and tempo, if occasionally a little four-square for my ears in negotiating Gluck’s structures. (We clearly hear Gluck differently, which is no crime. Far better this, in any case, than egoistic conducting that aims above all to draw attention to itself.)
All four singers acquitted themselves with honour, complementing and lightly contrasting as befitting. The extremity of Atalanta’s coloratura—could the Habsburg-Lorraine princesses really have come anywhere near singing this music?—was effortlessly tamed by Samantha Louis-Jean. Lucy Anderson’s spirited Asteria and Lisa Howarth’s sincere Climene were equally stylish. So too did Harriet Eyley’s Meleagro, whose heroism en travesti, both bright-toned and variegated, proved just the ‘early Classical’ ticket. If the splendid penultimate number, a duet between Atalanta and Meleagro, left both in peril of being outshone by Emma Feilding’s oboe, then that is Gluck’s doing. A joy from beginning to end, whatever our views on crowns, viruses, and their intersection.
Tito – Edgaras Montvidas Vitellia – Nicole Chevalier Sesto – Emily D’Angelo Annio – Angela Brower Servilia – Christina Gansch Publio – Joshua Bloom Senators – Jeremy White, George Freeburn Berenice – Fumi Kaneko Conspirators – Amanda Baldwin, Tim Parker-Langston, Nicholas Sharratt Guards – Andrew Carter, Davy Quistin
Richard Jones (director) Ultz (designs) Adam Silverman (lighting)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding) Mark Wigglesworth (conductor)
Over fifteen months since I had last set foot in an opera house—for Carmen at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden—it felt extraordinary to be back. All else would be secondary. Constant frustrations and persistent fears of the new ‘Johnson variant’ shutting down everything again made for a background of great uncertainty. Comparisons with the crisis of the social order sweeping Europe during the 1780s and 1790s will shed little light, yet all of us this side of Dido Harding and her fellow profiteers crave a degree of certainty some way beyond that our world affords us. Like the Prague Estates commissioning La clemenza di Tito to celebrate Leopold II’s coronation as king of Bohemia, we clamour for something we knew and loved well, whilst knowing that it can never be the same again—and that it almost certainly never was.
That something might be Imperial Rome, Habsburg clementia austriaca, or both, as recreated by the Caeasarian poet Pietro Metastasio for Charles VI’s name-day. It might be Metastasio as set by forty composers prior to Mozart, among them Caldara, Hasse, Gluck, and Mysliveček. It might be Metastasio as galvanised by Mozart’s revisionary librettist, Caterino Mazzolà, transforming blank verse into ensembles and, crucially, three acts into two, rendering the moment of revolt the choral climax of the first, as opposed to an offstage event mentioned in recitative. It might be Metastasio-Mazzolà transformed by Mozart; it might the lives of artists and audience, traumatised beyond measure not only by the dread virus, but by the fundamental, immeasurably deadlier disease of neoliberalism. At all times many, barely daring hope for the endgame and, more to the point, having no idea what it will be, find themselves craving reversion and restoration. Revolution, taken literally, invokes turning of the wheel; it was only events in France that turned its meaning to rupture—and even then, only partially. To see Mozart once more on the Covent Garden stage came close to many such impossible dreams.
Or rather in this case, hearing Mozart from the pit and onstage came close. Anyone could point to occasional flaws in ensemble, but to experience ensemble at all, whether from orchestra, chorus, soloists, or tutti, was more than enough for now. The last time I had seen this opera on this stage, it had been conducted by that emperior among Mozartians, Sir Colin Davis. Now was not, however, a time to look back, whatever the splendours and delights of those performances. For this was 17 May: if not quite le grand retour, then the beginning, we can only desperately hope, of the end. Secco recitatives were cut, but anyone can live with that, given Mozart’s lack of involvement in them; what remained was performed convincingly indeed. (I should certainly credit the harpsichordist, if I knew who it had been.)
This was not a Tito of immense grandeur, but looking at, listening to the world around us, there may have been good reason for that. Moreover, distancing within the pit, musicians one to a pit, necessitated a smaller number of musicians than ‘ideal’, whatever that may mean—or which may simply have been an aesthetic preference. Wigglesworth conveyed an inner, more domestic drama to the score that was not identical to Davis’s, Böhm’s, Muti's, nor anyone else’s—how could it be?—but which spoke from ruins on and off stage. It kept going in the face of adversity, and did much more than that. Swifter than we may be accustomed to, it was yet never harried and found time to relax: to savour many moments of woodwind—not only clarinet—beauty; to express pulsating life in Mozart’s inner strings; to urge us on to a close uncertain yet necessary.
Edgaras Montvidas’s youthful, mellifluous Tito enhanced that sense of present urgency, of a need to resist turning back. Politically Orphic, if you like. Nicole Chevalier occasionally struggled with her lower notes: how long must it be since many of these singers have appeared regularly, or at all, on stage? Hers was nevertheless a spirited, multi-dimensional Vitellia, more likeable than often, which seemed to be a choice. Emily D’Angelo’s Sesto captivated in a moral struggle framed by allure and weakness whose twin masculinity was only highlighted by the trouser role’s—originally castrato’s—blurring of boundaries. There was no doubting, moreover, her/his cleanness of line and general stylishness; likewise for typically fine performances from Angela Brower (Annio) and Christina Gansch (Servilia). Even Joshua Bloom as Publio, a thankless role, found space to shine. The Royal Opera Chorus, offstage throughout, made a welcome return too: doubtless equally true for its members.
Richard Jones’s production, however, was a bit of a mess. The vague neoclassicism, interior as well as exterior, of set designer Ultz’s Capitol worked well enough, so far as it went. Like the spareness of much of Mozart’s score—so different from that heard in the more-or-less contemporaneous Magic Flute—there was potential not only to frame, but also to propel, the drama before our eyes. Except it did not. Jones seemed on auto-pilot, offering little beyond a vague ‘look’ of fascism and football: a combination that might have been productive yet was not. Was the architectural model a Speer reference, imperial counsellors’ tailoring suggestive more of Berchtesgaden than south of the Alps? Perhaps, yet if so, it again went for little. Italian graffiti seemed not so much evocative of emptiness as merely empty. Why did a silent Berenice traipse around the set early on? Vitellia’s piece-by-piece destruction of her garland in ‘Non più di fiori’ could have been a model for careful attention to text not as artefact but as living drama. Much else, however, looked haphazard or even absent.
Shop-soiled ‘postmodernism’, laziness, or hasty quasi-improvisation? Probably all of the above, for this was ‘school of Richard Jones’ enough to suggest deliberate choices, however difficult the circumstances. A closing image of Tito running around the stage as if having scored a goal proved one of the most half-hearted attempts at Verfremdung I have seen since—well, Jones’s Covent Garden Bohème, which could not be excused by pandemic exigencies. Brecht is not to be reduced to a look, even by late capitalism; nor is opera. More in the way of Personenregie would have done this the world of good. Perhaps the singers will develop a stronger dramatic focus themselves as the short run progresses, responding to the mise-en-scène in ways beyond the director on this occasion. It is, in so many respects, early days. Maybe the present, however haunted by the past, always feels like that. Amidst all the uncertainty, it remained quite something to be back.
On the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Igor Stravinsky. Do any composer's oeuvre and 'voice' take in quite so much of the twentieth century and much else besides, whilst ever remaining itself? Petrushka or Movements? The Rake's Progress or Les Noces? Why choose? Stravinsky did not. And the more one listens, the more they have in common—until suddenly once again they do not, snarling and glistening in mutual opposition as dialectical as anything in Schoenberg, yet differently, if only for a moment. In this 'reliquary', furnished from fragments Stravinsky had left behind, Charles Wuorinen (re)constructs, varies, laments, and returns: much as Stravinsky himself might have done, and yet not. As one of Stravinsky's greatest interpreters and antagonists famously put it, 'Stravinsky demeure'.
One year on. Arguably not: it
is one year on, or will be this evening, from the last full-scale, fully-staged
opera I saw in the theatre, Carmen at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden.
Since then, there has not quite been nothing, even in the operatic field,
though nothing quite on that scale. (HGO’s outdoor, one-act Savītri
broke the drought; the newly formed London Opera Company’s heroic concert Tristan
with piano trio accompaniment; even a short new opera, Blue
Electric, at the Playground Theatre: these have all been lights to
lighten the darkness.) Moreover, there
have been concerts here and there, for which I am incredibly grateful, whether
in London or on a carefully timed visit at the end of August back to Berlin for
its Musikfest. I still had one left, the following day, in Berlin: Daniel
Barenboim and Pinchas Zukerman completing their three-concert survey of the
Beethoven violin sonatas. (Beethoven Year:
remember that?)
However, it was the beginning
of the end for anything remotely akin to the life I knew. I had no idea at the
time, none whatsoever. The virus was spreading across Europe. Plans for a
research visit to Milan had been cancelled; more importantly, pictures and
reports we received from there were horrific. Yet there seemed little reason,
at least to those of us in the dark with little or no scientific knowledge, to
think this would happen in Berlin or London. Three days later, the announcement
came that theatres and halls (initially of a certain capacity, but in practice
all of them) would close until after Easter, which was in any case when I should
reluctantly have to return to London, find somewhere to live, and return to
work on campus, research leave having come to an end. Less than a week later, I
boarded a flight out of Tegel, hurriedly booked ‘before it is too late’, and
arrived back in this country, homeless. I stayed a night with friends—that was
still possible here—and went up to Yorkshire, to my brother’s house. I had no
idea, none whatsoever, and would probably not have agreed to go if I had, that I
should be staying in his spare room for more than three months, forbidden by
law to leave to find somewhere to live, let alone to hear music or see theatre.
Where are we now? There is
vague talk of some performances from the middle of May. Who knows? We have been
there before. One would have to be insane to believe a word delivered by this ‘government’
of thieves and liars. For Friends of Dido Harding, this has been one long
excuse to steal, to profiteer, to repress, to laugh all the way to Barnard
Castle and beyond, and not least to put sectors of dissent—education, the arts,
the NHS and other public services—firmly in their place. Welcome to the endless
‘war on woke’, the true threat to ‘free speech’. ‘Art for art’s sake’ is a
slippery beast, both justifiable and unjustifiable. It depends what one means.
None of us wants art to fail to engage with questions in the world around us.
By the same token, none of us wants theatre, should it ever return, to be
nothing but masks, respirators, and—God help us—Microsoft Teams.
Right now, however, the fight is to retain any space for art, for criticism,
for resistance, whether in a narrow or broader sense: any space, essentially,
for life, for what makes us human. That can be a Haydn quartet, or a hug from a
friend; it would be doubly welcome, were it to involve both. Of the many
unforgivable aspects of this tragedy and its handling—let us never forget one
of the highest per capita death tolls
in the world, yet ‘Boris’ (sic)must ‘save Christmas’—has been refusal
to acknowledge that for many of us, whether in single-person or larger ‘households’,
our life-giving, life-protecting support networks depend on people and
activities beyond where we live. Many of us live alone; many of us are
separated from our loved ones; many of us do not have gardens; even for many of
those who do, they are not remotely enough. If what matters most of all to you
is your nuclear family, good for you; none of us begrudges you that. For
others, though, life itself has been constructed beyond that, be it in complement
or opposition to it. We do not want to watch streaming opera; that is not what
opera is for us. For one thing, we spend far too many of our waking hours
toiling away on screens as it is. For another, we need human contact; we need
the business, the surprise, the joy, even perhaps the infernal coughing of the
theatre and the concert hall. Many of our friends have lost their livelihoods, much
of their entire purpose in life. This is our ‘family’; this is our life.
Or it would be, were we
permitted a family and life. Halls and theatres have been made ‘Covid-safe’.
They need not spread the disease, unlike certain ‘priority’ activities that
shall remain nameless. Reopening would help so many in so many different ways.
We know why they are closed. We know the indifference and downright hostility
toward anyone who dares to be different, to be vulnerable, to be human. One
year on, it is time to fight in earnest—for life itself. Fidelio, aptly enough, was to have been my last opera in Berlin.
(This essay was originally published in a 2020 Salzburg Festival programme for a concert by Camerata Salzburg and Patricia Kopatchniskaja.)
GYÖRGY LIGETI: Concerto for violin and orchestra ANONYMOUS: Byzantine Chant for Psalm 140 (arranged for violin and string orchestra by Patricia Kopatchinskaja) FRANZ SCHUBERT: First movement (Allegro) from String Quartet no.14 in D minor, D. 810 – ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ (arranged for string orchestra by Patricia Kopatchinskaja) FRANZ SCHUBERT: Der Tod und das Mädchen, D. 531 (arranged for string orchestra by Michy Wiancko) FRANZ SCHUBERT: Second movement (Andante con moto) from String Quartet no.14 in D minor, D. 810, ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ JOHN DOWLAND: Pavane ‘Lachrimæ Antiquæ Novæ’ for string quintet from Lachrimæ, or Seaven Teares FRANZ SCHUBERT: Third movement (Allegro molto) from String Quartet no.14 in D minor, D. 810, ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ GYÖRGY KURTÁG: Ligatura-Message to Frances-Maria (The answered unanswered question), Op. 31b GYÖRGY KURTÁG: ‘Ruhelos’ from Kafka-Fragmente, Op. 24 FRANZ SCHUBERT: Fourth movement (Presto) from String Quartet no.14 in D minor, ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’, D. 810
Ligeti: Anxiety and Transformation of
Influence
Ligeti’s Violin Concerto stands as a truly indispensable work in its genre and a key musical work of the late twentieth century. Initially composed in 1989 and 1990, it underwent significant revision during which composer and work alike moved, so it seemed, towards a Platonic ideal, its sources lost, found, varied, and rediscovered.
During
hospital convalescence, the composer engaged in intensive study of Haydn’s late
quartets, which seems strongly to have influenced ensuing process of
clarification. ‘From Haydn,’ he told his assistant, Louise Duchesneau, ‘you can
learn how to achieve the clearest effect with the simplest means.’ When
choosing ‘between a more ornate structure and a skeleton, Haydn always chooses
the skeleton, never using one note more than he needs. I applied this principle
of avoiding unnecessary complexity … and thought that it brought me closer to
my ideal.’ Ligeti worried, however, that he had veered too close to Hungarian,
especially Transylvanian, folk music, replacing the first movement entirely. He
also revised and reordered the other two in an expansion to five movements that
yet never reached his originally anticipated eight. The version the work’s
dedicatee, Saschka Gawriloff, premiered in 1990 with Gary Bertini and the
Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra was always considered incomplete. Gawriloff and
Ligeti employed material originally intended for movements never completed for
the fifth-movement cadenza; Kopatchinskaja will play her own.
Ligeti’s
interest in different systems of tuning is very much in microtonal play. With a
few exceptions marked in the score, the soloist plays at concert pitch. Things
are difficult enough for her already with virtuosic writing, according to the
composer, born of models such as ‘Paganini, the Bach solo sonatas, Ysäye’s solo
sonatas, Wieniawski, and Szymanowski’. However, the concertmaster – one of only
five orchestral violins – and first viola – one of three – must play in
scordatura, tuned to the seventh harmonic partial of the double bass’s first string
and fifth of its third string respectively. Brass too offer natural harmonics,
while use of ocarinas, slide whistles, and harmonica both subverts and expands
our field of listening. By combining these ‘out of tune’ notes and harmonics
with those of the normally tuned strings, Ligeti sought to ‘build a number of
harmonic and non-harmonic spectra,’ such conflict between overtones resulting
in a veritable voyage of harmonic exploration. The more Ligeti listened to
non-Western music, the less he could allow himself to be constrained by equal
temperament. ‘It almost hurts’, he said.
The
opening is likewise elemental, alternating open A and D strings in lightning
succession, furthering Ligeti’s desire for a ‘glassy shimmering character’. In
this first movement, ‘Praeludium’, the solo
line gradually distinguishes itself from an apparent multitude of other solos,
emerging as a well-nigh traditional, first-among-equals virtuoso. Its magic can
be tender too, though, as in the violin’s duetting with an array of tuned
percussion.
Polymeters run riot, as they
will too in the finale, much of whose folk material and allusion Márton Keréfky
has discovered to have been reused, ‘albeit embedded in a totally new context’,
from the discarded original first movement. The impression of ideas, remembered
or misremembered, from earlier movements piling upon one another affords
reinvented climax, never quite as we have known it. Listening
to Thai, Khmer, and Laotian music afforded inspiration and example for Ligeti’s
consciously seeking ‘for a new kind of way of building a melody’. So too did continuing
influence from his Transylvanian heritage.
The second movement, ‘Aria,
Hoquetus, Choral’ opens with a low solo, G-string adaptation of a melody from
Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles for Wind
Quintet, and thus ultimately from his still earlier Musica ricercata for piano, the former being a transcription of six
movements of the latter. The movement seems to aspire to rootedness, be it
folk- or chant-like – are the two ultimately so different? – yet to find its way
thwarted, ‘continually splintering’, in Seth Brodsky’s evocative phrase, ‘into
weird ironic homelessness’. Such weird irony and modal aspiration are only
heightened by a quartet of woodwind pied pipers taking up their ocarinas for
the chorale. High, fantastical writing in the central Intermezzo has any number
of parallels in other violin concertos, yet can never be assimilated to their
party. The Passacaglia makes play once more with time-honoured form, riveting
in its never-quite-expected progress. Here beats the heart of the work and of
Ligeti’s generative anxiety of influence.
Byzantine Chant: To the source?
A chant-like, even ‘mediæval’ quality has been remarked on in Ligeti’s second movement. We now move closer to the elusive (illusory?) source, nonetheless mediated. Travel through musical history and you will find any number of instrumental works or movements based on song melodies. Such tended to be the practice in the writing of Byzantine chant. A text, in this case that of Psalm 140, ‘Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man’, would be set to a traditional melody and subsequently shaped – or not – to requirements of the verse. This tradition’s characteristic ‘four-element syllable-count cadence’ – four final syllables of a line, regardless of word accent, tied to four fixed, stylised cadential elements – has suggested to scholars an earlier psalmody than its Gregorian counterpart. To indulge in wild anachronism, is this also an early anticipation of modern clashes between words and music, given a further twist by arrangement for instruments alone?
Touched by Death
Schubert set Matthias Claudius’s Der Tod und das Mädchen in February 1817, two years after Claudius’s death. Here death approaches in instrumental sombre D minor. The Maiden vocally resists, bidding him not to touch her. He has his way, though, also vocally; he is not fierce and will have her sleep in his arms. The song closes with a foreshortened reprise of the introduction, albeit in an equally sombre yet peaceable D major. The manuscript might not have survived, having been cut into pieces by Schubert’s half-brother Anton, the Benedictine Father Hermann, yet was eventually reassembled. (It had in any case been published.) Ludwig Wittgenstein would muse on its fate more than a century later:
Recall that after Schubert’s death his brother cut some of Schubert’s scores into small pieces and gave such pieces, consisting of a few bars, to his favourite pupils. This act, as a sign of piety, is just as understandable to us as the different one of keeping the scores untouched, accessible to no one. And if Schubert’s brother had burned the scores, that too would be understandable as a sign of piety.
Showing the dead respect takes many forms.
Touched by Life
If the song is one of Schubert’s most celebrated, so too is the March 1824 string quartet taking its nickname and the theme of its second movement from it, touched by life rather than death. It stands as tall in its genre as Ligeti’s concerto in its. Resist undue romanticisation as we might, it is difficult not to think at least in partial relation to Schubert’s own coming appointment with the grim reaper. This was, however, the very time his friend Franz von Schober reported Schubert believed new medication had cured him. Either way, an artwork should not be reduced to biography, however tragic.
Tragedy is nevertheless present, vehemently so in the first movement, its second thematic group sweetly lyrical yet undoubtedly in the shadow of a furious D minor daemon not so very different from that which had captivated Mozart. The number of fortissimo and still more sforzando markings might visually suggest a score by Beethoven, although the triplet writing could not be more characteristic of Schubert: both in itself and for the particular variety of propulsion it offers. Such prospects of peace as there are, for instance a shift to D major during the recapitulation, find themselves swiftly, even brutally undercut. The uncertainty of where the coda will lead till it breathes its last offers an apt summation of tensions and overall tragedy in the movement as a whole.
We move to G minor for the Andante con moto theme and variations, five of them. Neither the first violin’s flights of fancy in the first variation nor the cello’s rapt lyricism in the second can forestall the pent-up fury unleashed in the third. If the penultimate variation, as might be expected, shifts to the tonic major and the final variation concludes likewise, this is as resigned, even exhausted a close as that to the original song. Only in the third movement trio, that Schubert can present a (relatively) sustained vision of major mode utopia. Sandwiched as it is, however, between the rhythmic insistence and almost bewildering syncopations of the scherzo itself, we know that it is too late. Is it fanciful to consider the rondo finale a Totentanz, a dance of death? Hardly, for this Romantic tarantella leaves us in no doubt as to the work’s ultimate destination, fury once more and now decisively winning out over resignation. Having the coda open in D major only prepares the way for the final nail in the coffin. Neither hope nor forgiveness is to be had; nor is it sought.
Old Tears New
John Dowland’s 1604 Lachrimae or seaven teares figured in seaven passionate pavans takes as its theme and first pavan Dowland’s existing song and lute solo, Lachrimae antiquae (‘Old Tears’). We hear here its immediate successor variation, ‘Lachrimae antiquae novae’ (‘Old Tears New’), its melodic melancholy and harmonic intensity both related to and a development – to borrow from the Viennese Classical future – of its thematic model. What Thomas Morley in his influential 1597 Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke had held necessary for expression of ‘a lamentable passion’ may be heard immediately: ‘motions proceeding by halfe notes. Flat thirds, and flat sixths, which of their nature are sweet’; semitones or ‘accidentall motions’ that will ‘fitly express the passions of griefe, weeping, sighes, sorrowes, sobs, and suchlike’. And yet, Dowland noted in his dedication to Anne of Denmark that tears differ in cause and effect. ‘No doubt pleasant are the teares which Musicke weeps, neither are teares shed always in sorrow but sometime in joy and gladnesse.’ Music mirrors yet relieves man’s fallen condition.
Kurtág’s re-enchantment
Two short pieces by György Kurtág ask further questions ‘answered’ and ‘unanswered’, perhaps even unanswerable in the case of Ligatura-Message to Frances-Maria, written in 1989, the year Ligeti began his Violin Concerto; and, in the excerpt from his Kafka-Fragmente, to continue the restless (‘Ruhelos’) Schubertian wandering that is our fallen lot. Solo strings and celesta in the former suggest re-enchantment of the traditional quartet, in a slow processional offering neither comfort nor discomfort but something beyond, magically or materially, even a foundational melody yet to be found. The latter piece’s whispered confidences and sudden eruption from intimate theatre into something finely balanced between cruelty and the absurd likewise seem beyond our ken, stretch our ears as we may. Like Ligeti’s Haydn. Kurtág never uses ‘one note more than he needs’. Musical mysteries endure.
Today is a palindrome day: 12-02-2021. Herewith what is surely the most beloved of musical palindromes, followed by bonus intervention from clever audio software to play the entire sequence in reverse, offering a double palindrome. As noted by the mind behind this, Jason Haaheim, the only differences lie in attack and dynamics.
The ‘Representation of Chaos’, with which The
Creation opens, is justly the most celebrated number in the oratorio, and
it is clear from the sketches that Haydn took unprecedented pains over its
composition. Heinrich Schenker wrote of Haydn ‘stretching and straining’ his
musical means, to recall in its mysteries ‘the mysteries of Chaos’. Without the
aid – or constraint – of a text, the composer depicts the universe prior to the
Creative act, whilst also prefiguring that act. This movement does not begin in
C minor; it opens with an emphatic unison C, of indeterminate length and
indeterminate tonality. As Hegel would point out in the second chapter of his Logic,
an absolute – that is, a true beginning and basis for all subsequent
determinations – cannot in itself be determinate.
From the outset, Haydn evolves his tonality, but
he does not immediately introduce a tonic chord of C minor. When the music
first seems to be heading that way, he substitutes an interrupted cadence for
the expected full close (bars 4-5). The cosmos does not evolve in a few
seconds, even in Haydn’s concentrated chronology. As the musical conception
develops, so do intimations of life. The very slow, swirling mass of nothingness
– ‘the earth was without form and void’ – is breached first by a triplet figure
(bar 6), and later by another sign of organized motion in chaos, a double
dotted figure. Lawrence Kramer writes: ‘From a scientific standpoint, the …
structure effects a heroic reduction of chaos to lawlike, quasi-mathematical
regularity.’ Surging dynamic marking evokes the ebb and flow of the first
tides, for it is from the oceans that the first life-forms will emerge. This
was recognized in contemporary reviews, for example that in the AllgemeineMusikalische Zeitung of 21 January 1801: ‘… single notes come forth,
spawning others in turn … Movement begins. Powerful masses grate against each
other and begin to gestate … Unknown forces, swimming and surging, … bring tidings
of order.’ As the Spirit of God moveth upon the waters, the life figurations
multiply and subdivide themselves, and the seeds of order are sown, before we
return to the void whilst awaiting the first words of this sacred drama. There
had been some precedent for this in the germinal introductions to Haydn’s London
symphonies – at any rate, all but no.95, which ironically is in C minor – but,
harmonically rich though they be, this is an introduction of another magnitude,
as befits an introduction preparing the way for the specific musical and
verbal drama of Creation.
Donald Tovey points out that the ‘Representation
of Chaos’ harmonizes well not only with the Biblical account of Creation, but
also with the work of Pierre-Simon Laplace and Kant. In his Universal
Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, disseminated widely since the
1750s, but even more widely during the 1790s, Kant had voiced the traditional
Christian doctrine of Creation in space and time (whose validity would be both
proven and denied in his subsequent, critical philosophy.)He had argued that ‘there is a God precisely
because Nature can proceed even in Chaos in no other way than regularly and
orderly.’ Haydn, Tovey remarks, ‘did a certain amount of dining-out in fin-de-siècle
London, [and] was as likely to have heard of the Nebular Hypothesis as a modern
diner-out is likely to hear of Einstein and Relativity’.
This is supported by Haydn’s visit to the
astronomer (and amateur composer) Sir William Herschel at his home in Slough
on 15 June 1792. There Haydn was able to look through the telescopes of the man
who, to all intents and purposes, added nebulae and the Milky Way to the
scientific map and was the first man in modern times to discover a planet,
Uranus. Unfortunately, Haydn’s notebook tells us very little about what he
actually saw, save for the length of ‘the great telescope’, nor of what they
said to each other. But a visit to this site of scientific pilgrimage – the
King of Poland sent Herschel his portrait, and Catherine the Great requested
specifications of his telescopes – would perforce have made a great impression
upon Haydn. Science and religion did not stand mutually opposed; indeed, their
close relationship is a key feature of Enlightenment theology. Thus Joseph
Addison could write, in the early eighteenth century: ‘Natural philosophy
quickens this Taste of the Creation, and renders it not only pleasing to the
Imagination, but to the Understanding. … It heightens the pleasures of the Eye,
and raises such a rational Admiration in the Soul as is little inferior to
Devotion.’ Kant likewise emphasized the ‘harmony between my system and
religion,’ which heightens his confidence in the veracity of his writings. And
Herschel himself, in a rare clue as to his religious sentiments, wrote in a
letter of 1794: ‘It is certainly a laudable thing to receive instruction from
the great Workmaster of Nature, and for that reason all experimental philosophy
is instituted.’
Nevertheless, God’s image has not been explicitly
evoked in the ‘Representation of Chaos’. Its closing bars, therefore, mark a
return to the mood of the opening, the pathos underlined by the descending
flute solo and Neapolitan harmony. In a sense, then, the next section of the
introduction renders explicit through words that which has gone before. The
double dotted figure is hinted at following Raphael’s ‘In the beginning, God
created the Heaven and the earth,’ and is soon stated most clearly (bars
69-71). But the explicit presence of God and His act of Creation make events
take a different turn; this is not evolution in an eighteenth-century, let
alone a Darwinian sense. Haydn’s outlook stands closer to that of Moses
Mendelssohn’s Morning Hours or Lectures on the Existence of God, which
we find in the composer’s library.This popular philosophy, derived to
some extent from Leibniz’s rationalistic deism, has at its heart the necessity
of God’s existence and rejection of Spinoza’s – and Lessing’s alleged –
pantheism. An absolute, eternal mind is quite certain, since the testimony of
the senses to an external world would be unthinkable without a necessary,
extra-worldly being.
Portrait by Bernhard Rode, c.1770
A generation earlier, the Swiss æsthetician,
Johann Georg Sulzer, had written of the
sublime (Erhaben), in his influential Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste:
We are moved as little
by the wholly inconceivable as if it never existed. If we are told that God
created the world ex nihilo … we experience nothing at all, since this
lies totally beyond our comprehension. But when Moses says, ‘And God said: Let
there be light; and there was light,’ we are overcome with astonishment because
we can at least form some idea of such greatness; we hear to some extent words
of command and feel their power.
Though Sulzer’s work was considered dated by some even
at the time of publication (first edition, 1771-4), his is a typical view for
eighteenth-century readers, writers, and listeners. It illuminates the
importance of the word in Haydn’s Creation but also impressed upon us
the magnitude of Haydn’s achievement in the ‘Representation of Chaos’. There,
despite what many would have thought, he has shown that the apparently
‘inconceivable’ can be conceived and received in the sublime manner. Nevertheless,
the sotto voce chanting of the chorus (‘And the spirit of God moved upon
the face of the waters’) engenders a sense of expectation and tension,
heightened following the words, ‘and God said: Let there be Light.’ Here, a
generation before the choral finale to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, we have
impressed upon us the necessity of the word – and the Creator’s primal,
enlightening word at that, which confers retrospective meaning and direction
upon Haydn’s preceding symphonic chaos.
Thus is the groundwork prepared for Haydn’s
greatest coup de théâtre, ‘… and there was Light.’ This conception of
courageous simplicity, the famous fortissimo C major chord, is entirely Haydn’s
own: he ignored his librettist Gottfried van Swieten’s advice that the darkness should ‘gradually
disappear’. It is a passage whose stunning effectiveness has never palled. Of
the London première (28 March 1800), Charles Burney observed that ‘the
generality of the subscribers were unable to disentangle the studied confusion
in delineating chaos.’Yet ‘the
composer’s meaning was felt by the whole audience in this passage; there
followed an instant interruption of rapturous applause.’ Haydn’s was a language
that could speak across national boundaries. As late as the 1830s, when, as
James Webster points out, Haydn’s music was ‘rapidly becoming passé,’
the æsthetician Gustav Schilling would write: ‘there is still no music of
greater sublimity than the passage “And there was Light”, … in Haydn’s Creation.’
This entailed connecting ‘the finite and phenomenal … with the infinite and
divine’. Such connection is precisely what the act of Creation is.
Light was a symbol that few in
Haydn’s first audiences would have fail to recognize at some level; it was not
simply or primarily a representation of the sublime, but was above all the
quintessential symbol of Enlightenment.Swieten had written to the Austrian Chancellor Kaunitz in 1774 of the need for ‘light’ in
politics; a ‘blind’ people could readily be put to bad use. More generally, he
had tirelessly urged the cause for a religious enlightenment of the people,
that their faith might be grounded upon rational conviction. Joseph Anton Gall,
a colleague of Swieten’s during the 1780s, and subsequently Bishop of Linz,
explained that the Redeemer had returned the world to a semi-paradisiacal
condition, that is, restored ‘Light’ to the world, since God in His goodness
could not bear to leave man in his fallen state. In Leibniz’s Monadology (first published in German in
1720), monads are portrayed as simple, windowless entities, which, through the
process of entelechy, strive towards greater and greater brightness until
united with the brightest and most enlightened monad, God Himself. However it
was interpreted, the symbol of Light was always on the side of the angels so
far as men of the Enlightenment – be they Protestant, Catholic, or Deist – were
concerned. Light had shone brightly from behind the dark clouds of superstition
on the title page of the first major book written by Christian Wolff, Rational Thoughts on God, the World, and the
Soul of Man. The Revelatory dazzling brightness of Haydn’s fin-de-siècle primæval Light shines all
the more clearly.
... page views. I am not quite sure how or why, but thank you to all who have visited over the years. I may be posting less at the moment, for obvious reasons, but I hope that will change soon.
In the meantime, a few pictures revealing Bernie Sanders's secret career:
Zemlinsky and Schoenberg, Prague, 1917 Image: Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna
‘I have always thought and still believe that he was a great composer. Maybe his time will come earlier than we think.’ Arnold Schoenberg was far from given to exaggerated claims for ‘greatness’, yet he could hardly have been more emphatic in the case of his friend, brother-in-law, mentor, advocate, interpreter, and, of course, fellow composer, Alexander Zemlinsky. Ten years later, in 1959, another, still more exacting modernist critic, Theodor Adorno, wrote in surprisingly glowing terms. Zemlinsky had ‘made more of the compromises characteristic of an eclectic than any other first-rate composer of his generation. Yet his eclecticism demonstrated genius in its truly seismographic sensitivity to the stimuli by which he allowed himself to be overwhelmed.’ We perhaps look more warily than Adorno or Schoenberg upon Romantic notions of genius, even as our concert halls, opera houses, and much popular discourse cling to them. Has Zemlinsky’s time come? Or is the question now beside the point?
In that Romantic vein, the Lyric Symphony remains Zemlinsky’s ‘masterpiece’: frequently performed, recorded, and esteemed. His operas are now staged more often, at least in Germany. In that same 1949 sketch, Schoenberg praised Zemlinsky the opera composer extravagantly, saying he knew not one ‘composer after Wagner who could satisfy the demands of the theatre with better musical substance than he. His ideas, his forms, his sonorities, and every turn of the music sprang directly from the action, from the scenery, and from the singers’ voices with a naturalness and distinction of supreme quality.’ What, then, of the invisible theatre of the symphonic poem, historically related to Wagnerian drama from Liszt onwards – as indeed in the œuvre of Richard Strauss? There are no voices, nor is there scenery. But what of ideas, forms, sonorities, and action? Die Seejungfrau (‘The Mermaid’) is Zemlinsky’s sole essay in the genre and now his most widely esteemed non-vocal work.
Image: Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna
It was not always so. After only three performances, in Vienna, Berlin, and Prague, Zemlinsky withdrew the score. The first performance on 25 January 1905 was also noteworthy for the premiere of Schoenberg’s tone poem, Pelleas und Melisande, and for being the final concert of the Vereinigung schaffender Tonkünstler (‘Society of Creative Musicians’), founded by Schoenberg, Zemlinsky, and fellow conductor-composer Oskar Posa only the previous year. It had already performed Strauss’s Sinfonia domestica and the Vienna premiere of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. Here each of the founding members conducted his own premiere, five songs for baritone and orchestra by Posa given between Zemlinsky and Schoenberg’s symphonic poems.
The audience did not react kindly to Pelleas, which had most likely been poorly performed (and conducted). Schoenberg would subsequently recall that ‘reviews were unusually violent and one of the critics suggested to put me in an asylum and keep music paper out of my reach’. That is what musical history has tended to remember. However, Zemlinsky’s piece, although misunderstood as merely ‘charming’, even in one review ‘heart-warming’, was received with greater enthusiasm. Such misunderstanding is nevertheless understandable, given that Zemlinsky’s aesthetic would always remain attached to an old-fashioned notion of ‘beauty’. In a 1902 letter to Schoenberg, he declared: ’A great artist who has everything required to express himself meaningfully, must observe the boundaries of the beautiful, even if he should stretch them further.’ To do so, he continued, would have a trained ear, ‘our era … yours and mine,’ hear mere ugliness. For him, Strauss crossed that line in Ein Heldenleben. Such would not be the path taken in the ‘symphonic poem, Das Meerfräulein, by [Hans Christian] Andersen,’ soon renamed Die Seejungfrau.
Marie Pappenheim, oil painting by Schoenberg, 1909 Image: Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna
It is uncertain why, following those three performances, Zemlinsky suppressed the work. He did not even mention it in a 1910 worklist he sent to Universal Edition. It appears he may have come to regret the persistence of elements of less-than-symphonic repetition, which he saw as more at home in the Viennese operettas he conducted to earn a living. The unpublished score was divided, the first movement given to Marie Pappenheim, a friend of Zemlinsky, now best known, alongside achievements as dermatologist and sexual liberationist, as Schoenberg’s librettist for Erwartung. Zemlinsky retained the second and third movements, taking them with him when he fled Europe for the United States in 1938. Only in the early 1980s did scholars come to realise that the three movements belonged together. Die Seejungfrau was finally published, receiving its first ‘modern’ performance, conducted by one of those scholars, Peter Gülke, in 1984.
In the letter to Schoenberg quoted above, Zemlinsky outlined his plan:
Part I a: At the foot of the sea (entire exposition) b: Mermaid in the human world, storm, the prince’s rescue.
Part II a: The mermaid’s longing; with the witch. b: The prince’s wedding and mermaid’s demise. Thus two parts, but four sections.
As work progressed – Zemlinsky wrote far more slowly than Schoenberg – the four sections remained, yet spread across a ‘fantasy in three movements for large orchestra’. The shift to three movements speaks of developing symphonic ambition; ‘symphonic poem’ is how Zemlinsky persistently referred to it in correspondence with Schoenberg. Even the narrative and pictorial ambition of the first movement, its storm included, are bound together by a Brahmsian mode of thematic working. ‘I had been a “Brahmsian” when I met Zemlinsky,’ Schoenberg recalled; ‘his love embraced both Brahms and Wagner and soon thereafter I became an equally confirmed addict.’
The scherzo has less in the way of narrative; it is more of a symphonic movement ‘after’ Andersen. Not for nothing do the waves of La Mer, Debussy’s three ‘symphonic sketches’, come to mind at its opening. The third movement too proceeds in notably symphonic fashion, earlier music revisited and transformed. It may ultimately offer a hymn to ‘man’s immortal soul’, yet far from dependent upon a programmatic idea, let alone a detailed narrative. We should not push such claims too far. Zemlinsky’s themes are motifs, associated with objects, ideas, emotions, as that ‘New German School’ of Wagner, Berlioz, Liszt, and even their successor Strauss would have understood. ‘Home’, ‘joy’, ‘despair,’ seabed, mermaid, ‘human world’, and many others speak of a conceptual dramaturgy extending beyond ‘absolute’ music, even if it eventually returns us to that realm. An age old problem of ‘programme music’ – do we need the ‘programme’ or not? – is resuscitated in a tale of neither fish nor fowl that, both in subject matter and in aesthetic controversy, redramatises and rephrases that very same problem.
Routledge translation, 1883
It is generally wise to beware reading autobiography explicitly into music. In this case, however, the romantic ardour Zemlinsky had felt prior to rejection by his pupil, Alma Schindler (subsequently Mahler) seems unavoidably related, at least in generalised fashion, to the work’s subject matter. Such would be the case more specifically in two operas, Der Traumgörge (‘Görge the Dreamer’) and Der Zwerg (‘The Dwarf’). The history and hysteria of the merwitch music, ‘bei der Meerhexe’, cut by Zemlinsky and only latterly restored in Antony Beaumont’s critical edition of the original version, tells its own bitter story. Dark brass writing at the opening proves unsurprisingly Wagnerian, although Strauss may be just as relevant. Disentangling the two hardly seems relevant. Haunting string chords, woodwind solos too, suggest Mahler’s early cantata, Das klagende Lied, which had finally received its first performance in Vienna, in 1901, albeit in heavily revised, truncated form. We might continue, isolating affinities with Till Eulenspiegel, Tod und Verklärung, and so on, yet what would be the point, without broader critical observation? Affinity is not necessarily influence; even when it turns out to be, there remains the question: ‘so what?’
Perhaps we come closer to appreciation of the work’s particular qualities when we recall that Zemlinsky, like Mahler and Strauss, yet unlike Schoenberg, was also a conductor of the first rank. The detail of his orchestral scores is noteworthy in itself and for its practicality, born of experience. That is not to say that he does not make strenuous demands; however, they are never absurd. (One might draw a comparison with, say, Liszt in his piano writing.) Beaumont identifies in this work the birth of an especially ‘singular aspect of Zemlinsky’s art,’ namely his ‘exploitation of the glissando,’ as opposed to Mahlerian portamento, ‘as an expressive device in its own right’. It could hardly have been signalled more emphatically, nor indeed originally, than in the scherzo: four unison trombones at fortissimo. Beaumont rightly acknowledges one contemporaneous usage: Schoenberg’s Pelleas, which requests muted trombones at ppp. Mere coincidence is unlikely. Who influenced whom? We shall probably never know – although Schoenberg’s greater speed at writing may just give him the edge of probability.
At any rate, as Adorno realised, Zemlinsky’s voice, impulse, and general priorities were more typical for ‘Vienna 1900’ than Schoenberg’s. Erik Levi has astutely described Zemlinsky as ‘very much a child of his time, a composer who enthusiastically absorbed a wide array of contemporary cultural influences, but whose distinctive voice only emerges after sustained exposure to his music.’ We stand in a better position to receive and learn from such exposure than previously; indeed, we have now for a little while. Zemlinsky’s time may have come upon us earlier than we knew.
(This essay was first published to accompany the Pentatone recording of Die Seejungfrau by the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and Marc Albrecht. See below.)
