Charles Rosen is a world-famous pianist who, like his great colleague Alfred Brendel, is also well-known for his writing. Here, Rosen covers what is still a highly controversial subject, that of feeling in music. This is a reasonably technical book, and readers without a musical education may struggle to follow some of the discussion.
But first, a digression. There’s an interesting TED talk by Itay Talgam about how conductors communicate with their orchestras, interesting because it’s just so wrong-headed about conducting in particular and music generally. He starts by showing the audience a video of the great Carlos Kleiber conducting the Radetzky March at the Vienna Philharmonic’s kitsch-laden New Year’s Day Concert. Kleiber is literally dancing around the podium, barely bothering to even issue a beat. This, in Talgam’s opinion, is the exemplar.
He loves how the audience is compelled to share their joy by clapping along. Actually, this is a long tradition in this specific piece in this specific concert, and not something spontaneous as he appears to suggest. Try clapping along to the St Matthew Passion and you’ll find you get an entirely different reaction from your fellow concert goers. Forget also that the Vienna Philharmonic could play that piece backwards, without music and transposed up a semi-tone without batting an eyelid, even if you woke them in the middle of the night and shone bright lights in their eyes. What Kleiber is doing there is pure theatre; the orchestra has no need of him whatsoever.
Taygam’s teacher, Leonard Bernstein, once “conducted” the Vienna Philharmonic in an encore entirely with his eyebrows and shoulders, a similarly theatrical stunt to Kleiber’s, and Taygam can’t resist showing it, and by doing so implying that Bernstein was doing anything other than just screwing around (in this case, I think, it was actually Bernstein blowing smoke up the notoriously chippy orchestra’s arse; the Vienna Philharmonic are very receptive to a nice buttering up).
Next up is Riccardo Muti in the pit conducting the overture to Don Giovanni. Talgam doesn’t like this as much; Muti is “a little too clear”, he says (we’ll leave out the fact that he’s not nearly clear enough: the orchestra entirely fail to start when he wants them to). This is Bad, because Muti is not having any Fun, and nor is he treating the musicians With Respect. He should be dancing around the podium like Kleiber was in Vienna, right? He goes on to explain how Muti was, in effect, sacked by La Scala for exactly this type of conducting.
This is just incredibly stupid. The opening bars of Don Giovanni are an exposition of the music that Mozart will associate with fate, and specifically the music that accompanies the Commendatore, murdered by Don Giovanni in the opening scene, when he returns to claim his vengeance, which he does by literally dragging Don Giovanni down to hell. It couldn’t be more different from the Strauss if it tried.
Muti is a terrible conductor, and even from these first few bars you can tell that his Don Giovanni is going to be unbearably turgid. But point the camera at any other conductor (alas, the reclusive Kleiber never conducted Don Giovanni as far as I know, and certainly not on film) and you’ll see them conduct it in almost exactly the same way. Here, for example, is the great Herbert von Karajan (who Taygam later incorrectly refers to as a “German” conductor) doing just that at Salzburg in 1987 (coincidentally the same year that he also conducted the New Year’s Concert, in a light-hearted way similar to Klieber).
Or here’s James Levine:
The three conductors – Muti, Karajan and Levine, all very different musical personalities – look almost identical.
I mention this because here is a perfect example of two different sentiments at work in music. The one is frivolous, frothy, and toe-tapping. The other is doom-laden, portentous and grand. What on earth would the result be if the conductor started dancing a march rhythm while trying to get the orchestra to play the overture to Don Giovanni? We’ll never know, because it’s an unthinkably stupid thing to do.
Taygam goes on to show Richard Strauss conducting another toe-tapper – his own Till Eugenspiegel – this time with the minimal gestures for which he was famous, and uses these and other examples to suggest an entirely spurious link with business leadership, all based on these incompetent observations of conductors at work.
Rosen, thankfully, is a brilliant, concise, and thoughtful commentator on the examples he chooses. The uncomfortable fact is that music does not have concrete meaning; you can’t order a pizza by playing the clarinet. The purpose of music, as Pierre Boulez so brilliantly put it, is to express music. Explanations of meaning – by which I mean attempts to decode what music “signifies” or “what the composer meant to say” that go beyond that are gibberish, and Rosen agrees.
I’ve always been puzzled about the way that music is presented as having specific meaning, especially the obsession with linking such meaning to the composer’s biography. Beethoven and Mahler are perhaps most abused here, the former with his deafness having supposedly prompted almost everything he composed after the 5th Symphony, the latter with his “triple blows of fate”, “faltering heartbeat” and so forth. It’s as if we think that Beethoven and Mahler would have preferred to write prose in which they spelled out their “message” but somehow accidentally ended up writing music, frustrated at their inability to communicate in a concrete way; or perhaps as though we could somehow reverse engineer a movie that they saw in their heads from the notes on the page.
Rosen’s book is a wonderful antidote to this sort of claptrap. It examines musical texts and analyses why they evoke the sentiment we experience. Along the way, he debunks the idea that specific keys have specific meanings, although he goes a long way to undermine that in his brilliant essay on Haydn’s use of C minor. I was instinctively hostile to this argument; I don’t think it’s a coincidence that some of my favourite pieces are in C# minor, for example. But Rosen’s analysis is food for thought here.
Music is inherently mysterious, and great music cannot be decoded to reveal the “composer’s intentions”. The composer’s intentions are the notes he wrote on the page. Rosen’s book is a wonderful exploration of how and why composers used increasingly advanced techniques for evoking sentiment in their music, and throws light on music by everyone from Bach to Berg along the way. Highly recommended.
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