Barber's Violin Concerto
If I approach this work (composed in 1939) with hostility, I can say nothing valuable about it. And if I object to the piece’s seeming lack of complexity, this only says that I personally prefer complex music, which I do, but which is totally irrelevant to any meaningful discussion of the Barber. One of the comments in these pages expressed incredulity that I could even consisder the possibility of Barber’s popularity waning. Well, I can conceive this possibility because of what happened to me from my conservatory days to the present, which is the central musical irony of my life. I used to love Barber, and American populism generally. I’ve always been attracted to the song literature, and Barber, Britten, and even Rorem meant a lot to me when I was 18-22 or so years old. The irony is that my conservatory teachers had total contempt for this literature and my enjoyment of it, and pushed academic modernism on me as the only possible aesthetic. I pushed back, and my conservatory career was less successful than it could have been because of my stubborness. And I loathed Webern. This was unfortunate, because of the climate I inhabited at the time. Nowadays, it is perfectly acceptable to prefer Barber to Webern. The irony is that my personal growth has led me in the completely opposite direction. So I’ve been at loggerheads both in my past and present. I should’ve grown out of academic modernism and into neo-romantic lyricism instead of the other way around. That would’ve been convenient, alas.
Barber’s Violin Concerto is very close to certain aspects of “popular” music; it (the first two movements) exhibits complete unconsciousness. It attempts, and magnificently succeeds in, creating obviously beautiful and appealing melodies. Make no mistake, Violin Concerto though it may be called, the first two movements are luscious songs. The extraordinarily clear and simple use of textbook sonata form in the first movement is there simply because the tunes have to be ordered in some way, and sonata form is as useful a vehicle for this purpose as anything else. Barber didn’t know much about the possibilities inherent in sonata form however, and most probably didn’t care about these possibilities; the mature Haydn or Beethoven at any time wouldn’t be caught dead concocting such a simple, textbook design. Notice how Barber telegraphs the beginning of the development and the beginning of the coda with a similar textural device of tense timpani thumps undergirding a pensive passage in the violin. Anyone can follow the design with absolute ease, as rarely happens in the classical masters. Also, notice the clarity of the second subject, with its trademark “Scottish snaps”, can’t miss it. In a quartet by Haydn or Mozart one is often hard put to categorize passages as subject, variation, or transition…not here. This is pleasing for many people, they can grasp the formal design with minimal effort, and are thereby free to luxuriate in the beautiful melodies. The orchestration is great, by the way; rich but non-intrusive, luminous and vivid.
If I say I don’t perceive any particular inner necessity in this piece, what does that mean? If I think the piece is “irrelevant” what does that mean? What piece in all the musical literature needs to exist? Is my response infected with what Taruskin calls the (dying) idealogy of German Romanticism? I guess so, but to quote Martin Luther, “Here I stand; I can do no other.”
A couple notes on the piece: apparently the hot-shot violinist who had the piece commissioned for him didn’t like it, for whatever reason, and never performed it. What an idiot. He plays junk by Wienawski and Sarasate and won’t play this piece, which just about screams, “I am going to be one of the most popular violin concertos in history, and I will make your career.” Dumb, dumb Dexter. The finale is a problem. No, not because it’s in a different style than the first two movements (the finale is a toccata like perpetuum mobile). I laughed out loud when the liner notes said the finale was in “a harder edged, uncompromising style”-it is just as simple and accessible as the first two movements. Also risible was one of Barber’s biographers saying that “Barber grew impatient with self imposed restrictions” in the first two movements. The finale is a problem because the work doesn’t feel like it is over when in fact it is over. Barber wanted to end with excitement, when in fact the piece ought to have ended elegiacally. Barber had problems with finales, generally.
Listening to this piece was a chore for me. It felt like a guy seeing an old girlfriend he used to find attractive walking down the street and realizing that he no longer finds her attractive, although everybody else continues to find her attractive. And I sacrificed something by going to bat for this literature in my conservatory days, and it feels like it all went for nought. Oh, well. I solaced myself by listening to another conservative concerto from roughly the same time period, Hindemith’s magnificently quirky viola concerto, weirdly called “Der Schwanendreher” that I enjoyed, let me tell you.
Barber concertos for violin, piano and cello, conducted by Leonard Slatkin with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra. Soloists: Kyoko Takezawa (violin concerto), John Browning (piano), Steven Isserlis (cello).
A Brief Comment on a Common Objection to Atonality
Like so many other classical music lovers, musicians, and bloggers, I too am impressed by the new book by Alex Ross, “The Rest is Noise”, and am enjoying this perceptive, engaging and big spirited work. But I would like to comment on a suggestion or appraisal made in the book concerning the deep difficulties a listener faces with Schoenbergian atonality — and I don’t dispute for a second that many fair minded listeners have difficulties with Schoenberg and his atonal colleagues and progeny. Schoenberg understood this as well. This is the passage I find problematical:
“The source of the {Schoenbergian} scandal is not hard to divine; it has to do with the physics of sound. Sound is a trembling of the air, and it affects the body as well as the mind. This is the import of Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone, which tries to explain why certain intervals attack the nerve endings while others have a calming effect. At the head of Helmholtz’s rogue’s gallery of intervals was the semitone, which is the space between any two adjacent keys on a piano. Struck together, they create rapid “beats” that distress the ear — like an irritating flash of light, Helmholtz says, or a scraping of the skin. ..similar roughnesses are created by the major seventh, slightly narrower than the octave, and by the minor ninth, slightly wider. These are precisely the intervals that Schoenberg emphasizes in his music.”
Most composers know nothing of acoustics, and don’t care to know anything about it, because they intuitively understand that the effect of any given interval or harmony is so contextual that the remoteness of any given overtone from the fundamental note is comparatively meaningless. The evolution of harmony teaches us this… compare Renaissance polyphony with a Clementi sonatina, or Gesauldo with early minimalism, or even Chopin with Tchaikovsky and the nexus between style and intervallic content becomes apparent. Phrases such as Helmholtz’s “distress the ear”, “calming” and “irritating” sound amateurish and possibly philistine, and the attempt to quantify a listener’s aesthetic perception scientifically is an old and fruitless game. It seems depressingly clinical, as well. And whose ears are we talking about? Professionals? the public at large? I’d like to trade ears with Pierre Boulez. You can’t tell me that Boulez perceives a minor ninth the way your Uncle Marty does.
Schoenberg emphasizes relatively remote harmonic relationships. So does Debussy. So do certain Jazz musicians. So does Ravel. So does Varese. So does my beloved Milhaud. But these relationships are as “natural” as any of the more obviously primary relationships. It’s a question of vocabulary and syntax.
Schoenberg’s music is difficult because he eliminates a hierachical relationship between sonorities and is relentlessly contrapuntal, and because he rarely repeats things. Some of his tonal works, such as the First String Quartet and the First Chamber Symphony, are as hard for the novice as the atonal pieces. I promise you, the First Quartet is more difficult than the exquisitely clear neo-classic Third Quartet, for instance.
A major reason why Schoenberg is so difficult, therefore, is not that he was the “liberator of the dissonance”, but because he was the “eliminator of the dissonance”…providing of course, that we apply the proper (natural) context for the workings of his admittedly esoteric and complex vocabulary.
To read excerpts from The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross, visit Alex’s blog. Alex also has links to listen to some of the works he discusses in the book.
Some More Random "Maxims and Arrows"
This is getting to be a habit. It’s great fun to make outlandish statements without any need to back them up. My sincere advice: If you write in objecting to any of these observations, I want you always to keep in mind that the maxims you are objecting to are not the only ones that need to be objected to; the other ones are equally foolish. The solution? Pack a picnic lunch and make a day of it.
Here Goes:
1. All the Transylvanian folk songs in the world aren’t worth one whisker on the chin of Bluebeard’s Castle. Bartok wasted his time with “ethnomusicology”.
2. Modern concert pianists are too perfect. Perfection is boring. Hear that, messieurs Pollini and Perahia? Make some wrong notes. Wrong notes are like shaking some pepper on your scrambled eggs. They improve the dish.
3. Can Korngold be that good? If hearing is believing, he is.
4. Forget the academy, please. Webern is a nature composer. He is closer to Mahler than to anyone else. And I ain’t talking about In Sommerwind.
5. French grand opera is a treasure. Why don’t we hear more of it? Money, money, money. And send me over some of those ballet dancers. You know, for later.
6. You want Russian neo-classicism? Forget Stravinsky. Your man is Tchaikovsky. Take an evening and give Queen of Spades a whirl. You’ll be glad you did.
7. Darius Milhaud. ‘nuff said.
8. But keep your Ned Rorems. Art songs or artsy-fartsy songs? You can keep Sam Barber too. (except of course, for Vanessa. Everyone knows that that’s a super dooper doo-dilly-doozer of a masterpiece. No wonder it’s played constantly!
9. Haydn’s piano sonatas. Somebody help me, pleeeeze! Masterpieces or bores?
10. Why is Prokofiev’s worst piano concerto (the third) the one that always gets played? And why is his worst opera (Love for Three Oranges) the one that always gets played? Did you know that in some jurisdictions, simply whistling the march tune from that opera is a misdemeanor? I kid you not.
Postscript to "If You Can't Beat 'em, Should You Join 'em?"
It occurs to me that in my defense of intractability, etc. I have made myself vulnerable to Richard Taruskin’s charge of irrelevantly clinging to the dying idealogy of German romanticism. And my case wouldn’t be appreciably helped if I substituted intractable works by say, Gesualdo or Scriabin for the works I did invoke by Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Berg. Oh, well, let it stand. When somebody believes in something, it is only too easy to find reasoning that seemingly makes one’s own point of view appear to be the best point of view. To borrow a rhetorical tool from Nietzsche, here are some “maxims and arrows” related to the subject at hand:
- A composer creates his own audience.
- Yes, he creates it, and then like as not abandons it.
- What is the difference between some run-of-the-mill divertimento in D Major by a Classical composer, and some piece for three amplified percussionists, called “Resonances” by a Darmstadter?
- In every way, John Cage is more old-fashioned than Rachmaninov.
- Yes, and Philip Glass is more old-fashioned than Puccini. Compare “Satyagraha” and “Boheme”.
- But Schoenberg, despite vociferous hype to the contrary, is not old-fashioned. You can’t be old-fashioned before you’ve been digested (and being an icon for a generation of university composers is not digestion).
- Mozart wrote approximately three times as much music as Beethoven. They have roughly the same number of masterpieces. Does this make Beethoven better?
- No. He just has a better batting average.
- Taruskin’s words, “accommodation” and “German romanticism” are new words for that old stand-by of Schiller’s, the “Naive and the Sentimental”.
- Re Taruskin: Beethoven is sentimental in this dichotomy, agreed, but is Shostakovich “naive”?
- Polemics are like junk food; they taste great at first, but anything more than a few bites leaves you feeling a little nauseous; one wants fresh air.
- Popular and “high brow” music aren’t the same subject and shouldn’t be compared; they serve different functions; but sometimes they overlap.
- The composer is closer to the poet, never the scientist. Beauty can’t be “proved”.
In “A Shostakovich Casebook”, Taruskin wrote movingly of an experience he had listening to a Shostakovich symphony with sophisticated musicians, in the Soviet Union. He relates that he looked around to see if there were expressions of condescension on the part of his Soviet colleagues, and was taken aback to see how deeply involved with and moved by the music they were, and it appears he had a sort of epiphany, or awakening, which led him to question the biases in our higher musical education system. Could this be the beginning of the train of thinking that led to his article, “The Musical Mystique”?
Review of Taruskin's Article, Pt. 2: If You Can't Beat 'em, Should You Join 'em?
reviews:
Who Needs
Classical Music?
Julian Johnson
Classical Music,
Why Bother?
Joshua Fineberg
Why Classical Music
Still Matters
Lawrence Kramer
I just spent the morning listening intently to Paul Hindemith’s 1938 operatic masterpiece, Mathis der Maler. This work is ultimately an apologia for the so-called, “ivory tower”. It’s also an apologia for Hindemith’s personal artistic and political credos, formed in the crucible of Nazi Germany, but that’s another story. In short, the artist determines that art is, if not above, at least not predicated or necessarily determined by politics, and the artist has a free hand to determine his own relationship to society, and is not to be bullied either by the tyrant or the (probably justified) revolutionary. The work is a blockbuster, a profound work of (it sadly seems) eternal relevence. Why this magnificent work is not a staple of the repertory, I cannot say…actually, I can, but the explanation depresses me.
Which of course, brings us to Taruskin’s exasperating article. Taruskin claims: “There are two ways of dealing with the new pressure that classical music go out and earn its living. One is accommodation, which can entail painful losses and suffer from its own excesses …Composers have accommodated by adopting more “accessible” styles. Love it or hate it, such accommodation is a normal part of the evolutionary history of any art.” I don’t know where to begin with this seeming advocacy of cowardice and cynicism. The fact that we have the St. Matthew Passion, the Grosse Fuge, Winterreise, and Wozzeck, among other works, already constitutes a persuasive rationale for the “unreasonableness”, the “intractability”, the “lack of accommodation” of the artist. Accommodation is a prescription for pap. And, by the way, I think that the works listed above have “earned their living”. You could say, they’ve “made their living”; blunt as this sounds, they have forced their way into the consciousness of true music lovers, and the desires of casual music-lovers, to whom Taruskin appears to cater, is something else, something to which Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and Berg, at their generally acknowledged, “best”, appear not to particularly care about…rest assured, lesser figures will care about this public, and the most fortunate of them will get rich doing it.
There are indeed, especially in academia, where so-called “artists” are protected from the judgement of the marketplace, composers who appear to produce sterile works for the approbation of their similiarly inclined colleagues rather than for the living consumption of real music lovers. This is a pathology, but this pathology obtains even more in popular genres, where imitation and formulae for commercial puposes rival the ubiquitous imitation and formulae extant in the Ivory Tower.
Taruskin: “The other way is to hole up in such sanctuary as still exists and hurl imprecations and exhortations. That is the path of resistance to change and defense of the status quo, and it is the path chosen by the authors of the books under review here. The status quo in question, by now a veritable mummy, is the German romanticism that still reigns in many academic precincts…” So Taruskin is overtly saying, “If you don’t like it, Lump it!” An artist can’t protest? And historians, by the way, tell us that vital aspects of Western Civilization was preserved by so-called sanctuaries (monasteries, for instance) in the Dark Ages. No, I am not suggesting that current academia serves anywhere near so vital or admirable a function; on the contrary, I tend to agree with Taruskin’s contempt for the self important navel gazing of so many of his colleagues. Quixotically, Taruskin’s suggestion appears to be similar to that of Hans Sachs’ (I’m fresh off hearing a broadcast of the notorious Katerina Wagner production of Die Meistersinger on Saturday) maxim of “let the people decide”…The people always decide, in the long run, Professor Taruskin, but they don’t need you to congratulate “them” (and I ain’t sure who “them” really is) on their immediate, unreflective judgement; especially when, as is usual, that judgment is a product of ever changeable current tastes and fads. And of course there are commercial, and even occasionally, academic, manipulation by professors and blog-writers, inter alia, who seek to influence them in their judgment.
Taruskin on the "Defense of Classical Music" Pt. 1
Who Needs
Classical Music?
Julian Johnson
Classical Music,
Why Bother?
Joshua Fineberg
Why Classical Music
Still Matters
Lawrence Kramer
Richard Taruskin begins his essay, “The Musical Mystique” by rightly deriding a pseudo-meaningful, pretentiously artsy-fartsy “experiment” perpetrated by violinist Joshua Bell at the behest of A WashingtonTimes reporter in which Bell posted himself in the most annoying and least appropriate place in the subway system and played Bach on his priceless fiddle, in order to record the supposedly a-cultural apathy of the average commuter. This sophomoric experiment hardly needed to be made. You could go into a doctor’s office where the piped in Muzak might be a movement from, let’s say, a Mozart piano concerto, and record the apathy of the patients. In fact, its arguable that authentic lovers of so-called “Classical” music are exactly the sort of persons who object to the trivialization and degradation of music represented by its infliction on a defenseless commuter or patient population that is given no chance to decide what it wants to hear, or if it wants to hear anything at all.
If I have to hear music in a dentist’s office, restaurant, or subway, I vastly prefer that it be bad music. Not only because bad music is less distracting, but because I like to hear great music as a deliberate choice, with a relatively formal listening posture. Real music lovers don’t want music all the time, and are disinclined toward the use of background music. This includes real music lovers who prefer popular genres, as well.
So far so good, Taruskin’s point is agreed. But then he comments, “In one respect, though, the caper was instructive. It offered answers to those who wonder why classical music now finds itself friendless in its moment of self perceived crisis-a long moment that has given rise in recent years to a whole literature of elegy and jeremiad.” Why are sideshows like the Bell experiment presumed to prove anything about classical music generally? Aren’t commuters, etc. smart enough to recognise that silly stunts don’t sully Bach, or prove anything at all about the viability of classical music? And is classical music friendless? Here in Chicago we recently had a magnificent performance of Mahler’s 6th symphony. I’ve been discussing it all week with my friends and students. Aren’t we friends of classical music? Or is it a numbers game? There aren’t enough friends, perhaps. But why would I care that 99 per cent of the American population at large doesn’t give a hoot about Mahler? What sort of “obligation” does anyone have to any kind of music? I think Taruskin rightly considers that no one has any sort of obligation. Again, this point is agreed. We would indeed have a problem if the Chicago Symphony orchestra went away. We would have a problem if less visible local orchestras went away, as well. But this doesn’t seem to be happening. Millions of people sort of liking something a little bit means less than hundreds of people deeply committed to something, provided the threshold of at least minimal commercial viability is passed.
Why all the insecurity? It couldn’t possibly matter to me what Taruskin thinks about Schoenberg; he doesn’t love it, and therefore doesn’t understand it. It means a great deal to me what Pierre Boulez thinks about Schoenberg, however. But it doesn’t matter to me what Pierre Boulez thinks about Shostakovich. He doesn’t love it, and therefore doesn’t understand it. But it matters a great deal to me what Richard Taruskin thinks about Shostakovich. I personally dislike almost all popular music with which I’m acquainted. So what. It’s not because I’m an elitist Teutonic racist, either. Ironically, Taruskin, who loves classical music and has given his life to the subject, doesn’t appear to acknowledge the perfectly possible sincerity with which one can abhor popular music and be exclusively inclined to the classical repertory, with no other guiding principle than personal taste. The 99 percent of the population that prefers various articles from popular genres neither intimidates me, nor is in a position to force their taste on me.
Taruskin takes plenty of shots at hoity-toity classical music lovers, with occasional justification. But he could as well take some shots at the sort of idiot who likes certain pop styles, who expresses ludicrous sentiments such as “Why don’t you forget about those out-dated European guys, and listen to music that normal people like.” I’ve heard plenty of nonsense like this in my time. It’s a kind of reverse snobbery. I’m tempted to respond in such situations, “If you’ll carfully listen to Die Frau Ohne Schatten, I’ll carfully listen to Doggy-bone Snoop’s latest album. Two can play at that game, mister!
Arguments are Won by the Best Arguer, not Necessarily by the Best Argument: Richard Taruskin's Polemic in The New Republic
Who Needs
Classical Music?
Julian Johnson
Classical Music,
Why Bother?
Joshua Fineberg
Why Classical Music
Still Matters
Lawrence Kramer
Arnold Bax described a genius as someone who has, among other things, superior reserves of energy. Joseph Joachim, violinist friend of Brahms, described genius as “doing with ease what mere talent cannot do at all.” We can all probably agree that genius requires exceptional intelligence yoked with creativity. For my money, idiot savants are a sentimental myth.
By these criteria, Richard Taruskin is a genius. Probably by most rational criteria. Can you say “indefatigable?” And his writing is scintillating.
But Taruskin’s awesomely scathing and intemperate assault in The New Republic on musico-sociological tomes by Julian Johnson, Joshua Fineberg, and Lawrence Kramer does him little credit. His vitriol, entertaining as it is, tells us more about Taruskin than it does about his maimed and bleeding victims. And I say this as someone who has little use for Johnson et. al, and who admires Taruskin no end. In fact, I buy and read Taruskin’s books, and it would never occur to me to buy the books he lambasts. But the viciousness and one-sidedness of his attack-piece may make me reconsider. Taruskin quotes from “The Sopranos”, but after reading his latest, I want to quote from “Mash”. There is a scene in a “Mash” episode where the fatuously moronic Frank Burns is “more sinned against than sinning”. Hawkeye defends Frank. He is asked, “Since when do you give two hoots about Frank Burns?” He replies, “Just now, and it’s only one hoot.” Well put. That’s just how I feel in this instance.
I plan on making more posts about this article, examining Taruskin’s point(s) of view in detail (he’s all over the place). The gist of the argument is that the three maligned writers are elitist, ignorant, out of touch idiots who want to preserve obsolete Teutonic-oriented prerogatives of taste-making and arrogant cultural monopolies of limited perspective, and impose these on some public; the general public? (is there such a thing?) The “musically inclined public”? They have allies in the “academic” “public”, I know… probably the widest public Taruskin can mean is the public that shops at Borders and Amazon. But even this isn’t certain. Taruskin actually questions Johnson, if not the others, in a moral sense. I also think Taruskin questions the sincerity of music lovers who admire certain styles (Arnold Schoenberg’s style, for instance). This is infuriating. I am as moved by “Moses und Aron” as he is by Musorgsky or Shostakovich, and genius though he may be, he has no right to dispute this. He can’t know.
Schoenberg once made a blistering and unfair critique of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, and ironicallyacknowledged in the very critique that his intemperance spoke against himself and in favor of the work. Taruskin doesn’t have to retract his objections to these highly questionable books, just as Schoenberg didn’t retract his criticism, but a review like this does the books a favor.
I should add that without Taruskin’s inspired, and if I can put it this way, intoxicatingly sober advocacy for Shostakovich, my understanding for that very great composer would be much the poorer. But “That was then, and this is now.”
Four Cellists, ONE Cello
Stringfever is a British band that combines string playing, humor and performance art. This hilariously impressive performance has been making the YouTube rounds lately. Yes, all four guys are playing “Bolero” (in four parts) on a single cello. Initially it was sent to me by Jacque.
Last Night's Mahler Sixth: a Real Review
Some Guy irately complained about my irrelevant, sophomoric, and esoteric “non-review” of last night’s performance of Mahler 6, and requested — nay, demanded — that I write a “real” review. To this reproach I can only say “Touche.” So, here is my Official Review, translated into Standard Written Criticalese
Some Guy irately complained about my irrelevant, sophomoric, and esoteric “non-review” of last night’s performance of Mahler 6, and requested — nay, demanded — that I write a “real” review. To this reproach I can only say “Touche.” So, here is my Official Review, translated into Standard Written Criticalese:
MAESTRO Haitink led a LUCIDLY INFORMED READING of the Mahler Sixth Symphony last night at Symphony Center. IT WAS WORTH THE WAIT, as the ERSTWHILE Concertgebouew leader AMPLY DEMONSTRATED. Classical RESTRAINT was combined with romantic ELAN in a performance that combined URGENCY with METICULOUS PRECISION. KUDOS to the fine playing of Concertmaster Chen, principal horn Clevenger and especially to that finest of trombonists, Jay Friedman. But if I take my hat off to them, I put it back on again when I consider the antics of that percussionist who kept walking on and off the stage. We go to the concerts to see the music as well as hear it, you know!
The tempi were SPACIOUS, but not OVER-BROAD, while the articulations ADMIRABLY combined FINESSE and a sense of stylistic APPOSITENESS with a POWER that NEVER SEEMED FORCED. VELVETY LEGATO GAVE WAY WHEN NECESSARY TO BRUTAL FORCE, and the extreme emotional states evoked by this TRAGIC LANDMARK [Actually this is only too true. -JG] CONFRONTED the listener WITH A SENSE OF HIS OWN MORTALITY. [True, again. -JG]
Anyway, this is the way criticism oughtta be written, pal. And to my irate interlocutor, may I pose the immortal question first posed by the eminent critic Carl Showalter from the movie Fargo: “Happy now, A———?”
Here are some favorite Mahler 6 recordings.
Mahler's Popularity? He's the Antidote for Medieval (and Modern) Anonymity: the Sixth at Symphony Center
by obsessing about himself, about Gustav Mahler, personally —and for 80 glorious minutes at a time as Haitink was in no hurry — Mahler gives us, by proxy, some of our dignity back.
Originally, my plan was to review the October 19, 2007 performance by Haitink and the Chicagos of the Mahler Sixth Symphony for these pages. But I decided (to borrow a phrase from one of the psychopathic hillbillies in Deliverance), “That river don’t go to Aintree.” My reviews of particular performances tend to end up like this:
Of course it was great. It was Mahler’s Sixth. It was Haitink and Chicago.
Others are welcome to recount how Haitink’s expansively paced tempi allowed for stentorian (yet plush) sounds from the brass, and other ephemera that you really had to be there to appreciate.
So, let’s talk about something else. How about, “What does Mahler mean for the intellectual and emotional life of a human being in 2007?”
Mahler said, “My time will come.” If he meant that lots of smart people who love music will come to venerate him, he was right on the money. If he meant that his music was ahead of its time or a vision of the future, he was mistaken. We have yet to realize Mahler’s vision of the future: the “Long 19th Century” may have ended with the First World War, but the twentieth century is still, sadly, with us. America is still in “Viet Nam”, the Russians (Soviets) still have a “Czar”, genocide still reigns in too many places, Nuclear weapons are still all the rage, etc.
In a sense, the Twentieth Century is a Medieval epoch. In Medieval times people were largely anonymous, like the characters in Die Frau ohne Schatten: the dyer, the dyer’s wife, the lame brother, the one-eyed brother, etc. All but the wealthy and powerful were so much at the mercy of nature that they, rightly, feared such things as being eaten by wolves.
The twentieth century has alarming similarities. People have names, but technology has made them anonymous (when it isn’t taking away their privacy). Even our “celebrities” have achieved a strange kind of anonymity due to their ubiquity. They’ve become an undifferentiated set of cute nicknames, completely interchangeable. (Was it Britney or Lindsay that got arrested last week?) Some don’t even merit a cute nickname of their own, but must share with a (statistically temporary) partner, a la TomKat, Brangelina, or Bennifer (one Ben, two successive Jennifers). They might as well be The Anorexic Supermodel, The Globe-trotting Humanitarian Actress, or The Former Bodyguard Baby-Daddy. Anonymous, anonymous, anonymous.
Fear of wolves has been replaced by fear of dirty bombs and climate change, but we’re still at the mercy of nature (science), because most people don’t understand it, and too many of those that do only want to deny it, abuse it or exploit it. And have you compared the virulent strains of faith propounded both by some American politicos and their unspeakable “fundamentalist” adversaries with their Dark Age counterparts lately? This is a Medieval epoch. There are Torquemadas, Savonarolas, and Sultans all over the place.
Well, by obsessing about himself, about Gustav Mahler, personally — and for 80 glorious minutes at a time as Haitink was in no hurry — Mahler gives us, by proxy, some of our dignity back. And he gives us the Nineteenth Century back, all over again. Hammer blows of fate doom the victim! The universe cares about us, even if its attitude is malevolent! And the unutterable hearbreak of Alpine beauty in the third movement! Nature is there to awe and move us, and furthermore, to co-operate with our emotional states. Our feelings matter! The third movement is so fabulously, extravagantly, jaw-droppingly beautiful that it verges on the unlistenable.
Arnold Schoenberg was right, as usual, when he flatly stated “Gustav Mahler was a saint.” But let’s not kid ourselves, he is our past, not our present. We can only hope that his vision will become our future.