IVIES LEVINE

on NERDi and AIOZART

COLIN DAVIS on BERLIOZ
BERNARD HAITINK
on /MAHLER
SIR ADRIAN BOULT on ELG4R
NIKOL4US HARNONCOURT
on BACH
SIR CHARLES /MACKERR4S
on HANDEL
JOSE SEREBRIER on IVES
CARLO MARIA GIULINI
on BR4HMS
CONDUCTORS
CONDUCTING
Bernard
Jacobson
Sir Charles Mackerras “emanates” his interpretations
from the podium. Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducts
from the cello desk of the Concentus Musicus ensem¬
ble. James Levine may think of Toscanini as he
prepares a Verdi opera. Bernard Haitink takes inspi¬
ration from the rich landscape where Mahler com¬
posed. Carlo Maria Giulini absorbs the colors and
moods of the countries he visits and senses the
correlation between their national characters and
their music. Sir Adrian Boult approaches the music
of Elgar from the perspective of one who was a close
associate of the composer. Berlioz’s own enthusiasms
and cultural background provide a starting point for
Colin Davis’s search for a faithful performance of
his music. Jose Serebrier has the additional vantage
point of being a composer himself.
But what, precisely, does a conductor do? How
is a performance created? How much of that per¬
formance is dictated by the written score and how
much is contributed by the intellect and temperament
of the conductor?
Conductors on Conducting is an attempt to char¬
acterize those traits of composers and conductors
which make for the performances we hear in the
concert hall and on recordings so that the reader will
have a more complete understanding of music. Ber¬
nard Jacobson, a widely-respected music critic,
explores these sometimes mystical aspects of inter¬
pretation and performance with eight distinguished
maestri who speak frankly, entertainingly, and always
informatively about these central questions. His
collaborators shed much light on the specific quali¬
ties a conductor seeks in performance. The technical,
expressive, and stylistic means each employs and
the background research and preparation that pre¬
cede the rehearsal are the keys to the appreciation
of music in performance.
During the course of the author’s discussions
(continued on back flap)
 S. MARK TERMAN

CONDUCTORS
on
CONDUCTING
 The Performance and Interpretation of Music

Conductors on Conducting
Singers on Singing: Opera
(in preparation)

Singers on Singing: Lieder, Cantata-Oratorio, Operetta

(in preparation)

Pianists on Piano Music

(in preparation)

String Musicians on Music for Strings

(in preparation)

Other Books by Bernard Jacobson

The Music of Johannes Brahms

 Bernard
Jacobson
CONDUCTORS
on
CONDUCTING
m
Columbia Publishing Company, Inc.
Frenchtown, New Jersey
Publisher’s Dedication
To Frederick Freedman —
musician, teacher, scholar, editor,
and friend to countless musicians, musicologists, and critics,
who devoted his life to music and the people of music

Copyright ®i979 by Bernard Jacobson.

No portion of this book may be reproduced, in any way,
by any means, without the permission of the publisher.

All Rights Reserved

First Printing
Manufactured in the United States of America

Interior book design by Quentin Fiore

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Jacobson, Bernard.
Conductors on conducting.

Includes discographies.
i. Music—Performance. 2. Conducting.
3. Conductors (Music) —Interviews. I. Title.
ML457.J2 78i-6’35 78-13038
ISBN 0-914366-09-2

Columbia Publishing Company, Inc. / Frenchtown, New Jersey 08825

Contents

Preface
9

Introduction
11

James Levine on Verdi and Mozart

29

Nikolaus Harnoncourt on Bach

47

Sir Charles Mackerras on Handel

71

Colin Davis on Berlioz

99

Bernard Haitink on Mahler

121

Iose Serebrier on Ives

153

Sir Adrian Boult on Elgar

185

Carlo Maria Giulini on Brahms

209

Index
229
Illustrations

James Levine
30-31

Nikolaus Harnoncourt
48-49

Sir Charles Mackerras

72-73

Colin Davis
100-101

Bernard Haitink
122-123

Jose Serebrier
154-155

Sir Adrian Boult

186-187

Carlo Maria Giulini

210-211
To the memory of
Cecil Ellingham and Roy Bentham,
two great teachers of English prose style
 Preface

The central concern of this book is musical style. Eight distinguished

conductors have consented to devote time and considerable thought to
the process of expressing in words what it is that gives a particular com¬
poser’s music its character, and how they go about the task of realizing
that character in performance.
I am the more grateful to them for taking this trouble since I
made it clear from the start that the composer’s identity, rather than the
performer’s personality, was what I was primarily after. Nevertheless, I
hope that the many touches of individuality emerging from the conver¬
sation of these eight gifted and dedicated men may help to make a fairly
arduous inquiry more entertaining. To that end, I have edited as little as
possible, trying to keep the flavor of the language even when it sounds
slightly foreign, and keeping whatever form of the standard musical
terms — American or British — happened to be used. So you will find half
note and minim, quarter note and crotchet, eighth note and quaver, six¬
teenth note and semiquaver cropping up indifferently in the chapters
that follow.
Each chapter, likewise, takes its own shape on the natural
course of the responses, though I did have a number of basic questions
that were asked more than once. To my own critical assumptions,
which obviously determined what those questions would be, I have
given some scope in the introduction. There it will be clear that I differ
sharply from some of my music critic colleagues on a number of aesthet¬
ic questions, particularly in the thorny matter of the relation between
the so-called “subjective” and “objective” schools of performance.
Anyone who has read Harold C. Schonberg’s book The Great Conduc¬
tors will see at once that my critical standpoint is especially distant from
his. I must therefore be sure to emphasize that, philosophical disagree¬
ments apart, I have myself found his book an invaluable source of
amusing and often illuminating anecdote. Frederick Dorian’s The
History of Music in Performance has, with the same qualification, proved
another useful source, and Paul Henry Lang offers many incidental
touches of voluminous knowledge and shrewd judgment on our sub¬
ject in the course of his Music in Western Civilization.
Bernard Jacobson
Wymondham, Norfolk, England
 Introduction

The art of conducting, on daily display though it is in hundreds or even

thousands of concert halls and opera houses around the world, yet re¬
mains the most obstinately indefinable of musical activities. Yes, ever)7
listener knows, up to a point, what a conductor does. He—the conduc¬
tor is far more often “he” than not, and in the absence of an epicene per¬
sonal pronoun readers are asked to forgive my shorthand for a tiresome
reiteration of “he or she” —stands in front of the orchestra and waves,
usually, a little stick. If we are lucky, some rhythmic relation will be
observed between the movements of the stick and the progress of the
music. He seems to receive a larger share than his orchestra of the au¬
dience’s applause, though he has not normally played a note. And, as
those who read the musical press may suspect, he also receives the
largest fees in an age when his kind has replaced all but the most ex¬
traordinary sopranos as principal object of public respect and adula¬
tion.
Yet all that is surface. None of it answers the question of how
he produces his effects, or whether, for that matter, they can truly be
called “his” at all. We can all observe more or less closely how a pianist
or violinist or other instrumentalist makes his sound. How does the
conductor play on his instrument, the orchestra, or is the very concept
indeed applicable in his case? Is he an inspirer, a grand planner, or just a
glorified policeman? Still more interestingly, since these are questions
that go beyond mere execution toward the roots of musical content,
how does conductor X’s performance of the Beethoven Ninth Sym¬
phony relate to that of the Y Philharmonic, which he happens to be con¬
ducting, and how do both relate to the ideas Beethoven conceived and
put on paper? And what latitude of interpretation, above and beyond
the written score, did composers expect of the conductor?
There is a touch and more of mystery about the way a conduc¬
tor works. Sir Charles Mackerras’s assertion in this book that “by sim¬
ply thinking, I can produce an entirely different performance” may

11
 12
Conductors on Conducting

sound impossibly metaphysical to those who demand a rational ex¬

planation for everything. But it is far from being an idiosyncratic view.
In 1905, when Arthur Nikisch —one of the greatest conduc¬
tors of that or any period —rehearsed the London Symphony Orchestra
for a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, one of the players
observed: “The weird part of it all was that we played the symphony
through—with scarcely a word of direction from Herr Nikisch — quite
differently from our several previous performances of the same work.
He simply looked at us, often scarcely moving his baton, and we played
as those possessed.” And what the flutist Fiirstenau, in his old age, told
Felix Weingartner about Richard Wagner’s conducting in Dresden
some sixty years earlier, though at first sight contradictory, is really only
another way of saying the same thing. The players, he recalled, had no
sense of being led — each believed himself to be freely following his own
feeling, yet they all worked together wonderfully. “It was Wagner’s
mighty will,” as Weingartner reports the conversation, “that powerfully
but unperceived had overborne their single wills, so that each thought
himself free, while in reality he only followed the leader, whose artistic
force lived and worked in him.”
No part of what follows is intended to obscure or call in ques¬
tion the inexplicable communication of personality that is central to
conducting as we now understand it. On the contrary, a brief look at
the way the art evolved may help us to put the mysterious element in
context. We might then better understand how it is that a conductor
goes about the task of making his Mahler, for example, quite distinct
from his Richard Strauss or his Bach from his Handel, to say nothing of
the far more basic distinction between the one pair and the other. For
however exceptional a composer’s genius may make him, what he ex¬
pects of his performers is bound to depend in large measure on the
ordinary practices of his time—and this is true, in a different but equally
illuminating way, even when he is rebelling against those practices.

Since its shadowy origins about 700 years ago, the history of
conducting falls into three periods. The first of these extended roughly
from the late Middle Ages to the decline of the Renaissance musical
styles in the seventeenth century. The second outlived the heyday of the
Baroque and lasted until around 1800, and the third shows no sign of
playing itself out in our own time. Though utterly different in spirit for
reasons which we will consider in a moment, the first and third per¬
iods—which may imprecisely but conveniently be termed Renaissance
 13
Introduction

and Modern—are linked by the common presence of the man waving

either the little stick or something like it, or at the very least his hand.
During the Baroque interregnum, the baton-wielder handed his coordi¬
nating function over either to a keyboard player (the Kapellmeister or
maestro al cembalo), or to a string player (most commonly the first
violinist, or concertmaster), or more usually to a kind of freely interac¬
ting committee of the two.
Between the thirteenth century, when writers like the French
monk Elias Salomonis (in his Scientia artis musicae) set down the earli¬
est accounts of conducting practice, and the seventeenth, the human
voice played a central —often the central —role in musical life. So it is
not surprising that Salomonis, Andreas Ornithoparcus (in his Musicae
activae micrologus of 1516), and other theorists of the time always
specified or assumed that the conducting will best be done by one of the
singers. In Salomonis’s description, the conductor “beats time on the
[music] book with his hand and indicates the cues and rests to the
singers. But if one of them sings incorrectly or too softly, or makes a
wrong entry, he will whisper in his ear: ‘You are too soft, your tones are
wrong, your timing is wrong,’ in such a way that the others are not
aware of it; or sometimes he will sing with one of them as the need
arises, and in this way he will secure the right sound throughout the tex¬
ture.” Ornithoparcus, too, speaks of hand movements.
But however it was done, time-beating was certainly regarded
as a normal practice before the fifteenth century was out. Contempo¬
rary pictures and written accounts attest to the frequent use of a stick or
a roll of paper, called a “sol-fa.” Often, as even the earliest pictures
show, the baton became quite a formidable affair. To make things
easier for his players and singers, the conductor could use a long stick to
render his beat audible as well as visible —a practice whose disadvan¬
tages came drastically home to Lully in 1687. Thumping his stick on the
floor during the performance of a Te Deum to celebrate Louis xiv’s
recovery from illness, the celebrated composer-conductor accidentally
hit his foot, and the abscess that resulted led first to gangrene, and then
to his death. Less dramatically, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his 1767 Dic-
tionnaire de musique, was still complaining about the “insufferable
noise” made by conductors banging the baton against a desk.

But more than one hundred years before that, changes were
already on the way. As Renaissance styles had given place to Baroque,
instruments took on a new independence and musical texture came to
 14
Conductors on Conducting

be dominated by the thorough-bass, or basso continuo—essentially a

form of shorthand which enabled a keyboard instrumentalist to extem¬
porize inner parts from a text that showed only the bottom line. At the
same time, the coordinating role passed naturally enough to the new
breed of players —to the virtuoso violinist-composers of the late sev¬
enteenth century, like Heinrich Biber in Austria and Arcangelo Corelli
in Italy, and their successors, above all Antonio Vivaldi, or to the
keyboard players, among them George Frideric Handel and J. S. Bach,
who presided at a harpsichord placed in the physical center of the
ensemble.
It was still the rule, we must remember, for composers to be
involved in most performances themselves. Taste had not yet turned its
back on the contemporary and the bulk of the music to be heard was
new. But whatever eminence and authority either violinist or harp¬
sichordist might possess, he would still normally divide the responsibil¬
ity of preparing and guiding the performance with his colleague. As late
as the 1790s, Joseph Haydn, seated at one of those new-fangled pianos
that were all the rage in England, shared the direction of his famous
London concerts with Johann Peter Salomon, the enterprising violinist
and impresario who had invited him to the city and thus given him the
stimulus to compose the twelve great “London” symphonies.
What is perhaps surprising musically, though not psychologi¬
cally since power is something few like to give up once they possess it, is
that the practice of divided leadership clung on as long as it did. During
the second half of the eighteenth century, as the orchestra moved
toward a more and more standardized makeup in which rapidly im¬
proving wind instruments played an increasingly integral part, compos¬
ers took to writing their music down with all the harmonies complete
instead of leaving much of the texture to the performers’ inspiration of
the moment. The continuo, in consequence, became unnecessary. It is
hard to imagine what Haydn’s harpsichord or piano could usefully have
added to his supremely finished scores of the 1780s and 1790s, and only
the most self-consciously stylish of modern performances use a
keyboard instrument for these works. Yet Haydn went on leading that
way.
Johann Forkel relates, in the volume for 1789 of his
Musikaliscber Almanack fur Deutschland, that there was a Viennese
performance of a cantata by C. P. E. Bach in which “Kapellmeister Herr
Mozart beat time and had the score” (the far more common practice,
surviving into the nineteenth century, was for conducting to be done
 15
Introduction

from either the bass or the violin part). Yet on this occasion there was
still another Kapellmeister, Umlauf, making his own contribution from
the keyboard.
Two decades into the nineteenth century, in the time of Bee¬
thoven’s late maturity, there were still keyboard conductors around to
provoke complaints of impracticality and anachronism. Nor did the
violinists yield their prerogatives without a struggle. In 1847, after the
first London performance of Mendelssohn’s Elijah, which the com¬
poser himself conducted with a baton, the critic of the London Times
complained of a concertmaster who “was constantly beating time with
his fiddlestick in such a manner as to obstruct the view of the Conductor
and to confuse the attention of the instrumentalists.” And away from
the major musical centers the practice was even longer dying, as is
witnessed by the Leeds organist William Spark’s memoirs of the city’s
musical life as late as the 1880s.
Though they could still precipitate an occasional skirmish, the
instrumentalists were losing the battle against the baton. In Berlin in
1776, when he became Kapellmeister to Frederick the Great, Johann
Friedrich Reichardt dispensed with the conventional keyboard and led
his ensemble from a separate desk that served purely for conducting.
Several contemporary accounts afford a vivid picture of Beethoven
standing at a similar desk, almost disappearing beneath it when he
wanted to coax a pianissimo from the players, and leaping in the air for
a forte. Gasparo Spontini, nearly forgotten today as a composer, set a
new level of discipline and vigor with the comprehensiveness of his one-
man rule as a conductor of opera (mainly Italian) in Berlin between 1820
and 1841, and Franfois-Antoine Habeneck, more by dint of conscien¬
tious rehearsal than through the possession of any remarkable flair,
made a comparable contribution in the orchestral sphere with the
Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire de Paris he founded in 1828 and
led for twenty years.
In one way, Habeneck was a throwback. He conducted from
the violin part, beating time with a bow —which even the celebrated
violinist and conductor Ludwig Spohr had given up by 1817, first for a
roll of paper, and then finally for a baton. But being essentially an in¬
terpretative musician, and only in a very minor way a composer, Habe¬
neck also pointed some way into the future. Conductors up to his time
had always been distinguished composers too. Besides Beethoven, the
most recent instance had been Carl Maria von Weber, who made
almost as important a contribution to the conducting of opera as to its
 16
Conductors on Conducting

composition, combining a high degree of sensitivity with a penchant for

organization that foreshadowed Spontini and enabled Weber to cut
rehearsal time down to less than half of his predecessors’ needs.
For several years more, the central figures in the development
of the art were four of the leading composers of the period: Berlioz,
Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Wagner. Mendelssohn, noted by his contem¬
poraries for the polish of his performances as well as for his penchant
for fast tempos, brought a new care and balance to the often neglected
art of program building. He took particular trouble to seek out
neglected works, giving the first “modern” performance of Bach’s St.
Matthew Passion in 1829 and, ten years later, the first performance ever
of Schubert’s Great C Major Symphony. It was Mendelssohn, too,
whose conductorship of the Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts from 1835 on
gave Germany its first orchestra to rival the standards of performance
for which Habeneck had made Paris famous. Berlioz and Wagner seem
to have been the two most magnetic and exciting conductors of their
age. The effect of their writings has also been deep and lasting. Berlioz’s
essay on conducting at the end of his still-used orchestration manual
(Traite de l’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes: avec supple¬
ment «Le Chef d’orchestre» [1844]) codified the physical specifics of the
conductor’s beat with unprecedented clarity and common sense, going
on to offer suggestions for subdividing the beat and admirably practical
hints on many problems of performance. Wagner’s main theoretical
contributions lay in his exposition of two principles that, as a practical
conductor, he shared with Liszt: the need to derive the beat, not from
the mathematical divisions of the measure, but from the melos—the line
of the music considered in all its aspects; and the importance of allow¬
ing tempo to respond to the changing expressive modes of the composi¬
tion.

It was with the next two generations that the purely executant
conductor in the Habeneck mold came into his own. From Hans von
Biilow, who was born in 1830, by way of Hermann Levi, Hans Richter
(a major figure in the English musical life of his day), and Anton Seidl
(at one time the permanent conductor of the New York Philharmonic
and active at the Metropolitan Opera), to Felix Mottl, born in 1856,
many leaders of the new school were Wagner disciples. Others, like the
German-born Theodore Thomas, who did much to educate American
musical taste and who founded the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in
1891, and the Hungarian Nikisch, developed far from Bayreuth but did
pioneering work in the performance of Wagner’s music. With Karl
 17
Introduction

Muck, bom in Darmstadt in 1859 and conductor of the Boston Sym¬

phony Orchestra between 1906 and 1918, and Felix Weingartner, born
in Zara, Dalmatia, in 1863, a dominant figure in Europe for half a cen¬
tury and a frequent guest conductor in the United States, came a strong
and often conscious reaction against the “excesses” of the Wagnerian
school of tempo modification.
Weingartner, like his German successors Otto Klemperer and
Wilhelm Furtwangler, regarded himself as composer first and con¬
ductor second. Listeners of their own time and since have rejected their
judgment. And with only two clear exceptions—Mahler and Richard
Strauss—and a handful of in-between ones like Antal Dorati, Jean Mar-
tinon, Leonard Bernstein, Bruno Maderna, Pierre Boulez, and Andre
Previn (and, one is tempted to add, that celebrated recomposer,
Leopold Stokowski), most conductors since then, of whatever inter¬
pretative school, have concentrated on performing to the virtual ex¬
clusion of composing. (Obviously, men like Igor Stravinsky and Hans
Werner Henze, widely admired as conductors but almost exclusively of
their own music, form a separate category.)
The change from all-rounder to specialist performer followed
naturally and necessarily from nineteenth-century developments in mu¬
sical language and practice. For one thing, the performing apparatus
was becoming so large, and scores correspondingly so complex, that
their mastery called for long and rigorous application of the conductor’s
mind —and often, for the sort of mind not necessarily well adapted to
the more directly creative process of composition. But the shift was not
only in scale; it was a transformation also of attitude and atmosphere.
With the Romantic movement, the picture of the artist as someone do¬
ing, like anyone else, useful work for the society around him gave place
to the image of the lonely creator in his (preferably squalid) garret, fated
to be understood only by posterity. The purely personal results of this
change, embryonic in the more self-absorbed moments of a man like
Beethoven, reached probably their highest point of unpleasantness in
the egocentricity of Wagner. But there were consequences on the
musical side too. Composers gradually narrowed down the area of
creative responsibility they shared with performers, and sought instead
to be ever more specific in fixing their detailed intentions on the written
page, to the point where, as James Levine puts it, a Mahler score
becomes “a conductor’s road map.”

The conductor’s new status can be viewed in two ways. In one

sense, becoming the composer’s servant instead of a participant in the
 18
Conductors on Conducting

creative process was a move downward in the artistic hierarchy. Yet

acolytes, too, have always possessed a certain aura of specialness—and
in the course of the nineteenth century, conductors, instead of being
equal-but-somewhat-more-equal members of a band united in the act
of performance, began to be seen more and more as mediators between
the divine inspiration of the composer and the imperfect understanding
of the orchestra, and this position tended to put them in a parent-child
relationship with “ordinary” instrumentalists and singers. It was such
an attitude that decisively separated the era of the new conductors from
the earlier period of baton direction in the seventeenth century and
before, and it has largely survived into our own century. Bruno Walter,
one of the more mystically inclined conductors of recent times, is even
said to have been seen standing in a corner of his dressing room before a
concert communing with the spirit of Mozart.
Since his activity is much more visible than what the composer
does, the conductor is still seen as the sun around which the musical
planetary system revolves—though on the highly organized American
orchestral scene his status, complicated by the enormous administrative
demands that have now been added to his artistic workload, has changed
from that of high priest to something like chief executive, in evident
accord with the character of a secular society.
Thus, though a great deal of conducting was done before the
days of Berlioz, Wagner, and their successors, there are important
senses in which Serge Koussevitzky’s assertion that “orchestral con¬
ducting was born at the end of the nineteenth century and really flour¬
ished only in our time,” and Mackerras’s observation that “in
Handel’s own time a conductor was not required,” are both true.
Technically, musicians (and audiences) before the nineteenth century,
disposing in the first place of less complicated performing forces and
of instruments and instrumental techniques that had a much narrower
expressive range, were furthermore far less demanding in the matter
of precision. It is true that Lully, lording it over the French musical
establishment of the mid-seventeenth century, and Gluck, in the Paris
of one hundred years later, were prototypes of the latter-day martinet-
conductor. But outside Paris and perhaps two or three other centers,
the standards of orchestral execution and ensemble such men de¬
manded were unknown. Recordings and radio did not exist to dissem¬
inate these exceptional values far from the centers where they were
practiced, and even for a well-schooled musician, finding himself for
the first time in, say, late-eighteenth-century Mannheim, the experi-
 19
Introduction

ence of hearing an orchestra play really brilliantly, responsively, and to¬

gether must have been a revelation—as, indeed, the thoroughly knowl¬
edgeable Charles Burney’s account of his visit to that city of the Rhine
Palatinate in 1772 shows that it was.
The general feeling of technical laissez-faire depended, more¬
over, on something deeper. In an interpretative sense, while autocratic
composer-conductors like Gluck did exercise a “minute care and
solicitude for the utmost faithfulness to the original score” beside
which, as Paul Henry Lang writes in Music in Western Civilization,
“the legends that circulate about the tyrannical requirements of Tosca¬
nini pale,” Gluck and his kind were exceptional as much in what they
wanted as in their ability to get it. The notion of “one interpretation, the
ideal, which it is never possible to reach, but which is somehow in
mind” (referred to by Nikolaus Harnoncourt here) was essentially a
nineteenth-century innovation. Paradoxically, it follows that any con¬
scious modern approach to a genuine Baroque (or earlier)
style —whether along the consciously empirical, eclectic lines repre¬
sented by a gifted individualist like Mackerras, or through efforts like
those of Harnoncourt to recreate the original sound as nearly as pos¬
sible—is itself bound, in essence, to be inauthentic. Even if we leave
aside the red, though tasty, herrings of commentators like Donald
Tovey (who slyly observed that a truly authentic performance of a Bach
cantata would have to be marked by consistently bad intonation, and
followed by beating the choirboys), there can be little doubt that the
very concept of “fidelity to the composer’s intentions” was foreign to
most eighteenth-century minds, and that the related impulse to
“recreate” the conditions of a past musical age would have been greeted
by them with robust incomprehension.
But if performers and composers before the nineteenth centu¬
ry were largely innocent of the notion of authenticity, at least two
awkward questions face the interpreter in our own time. One of them
takes the paradox implicit in the conscious imposition of laissez-faire
and extends it to the musical practice of all periods: Performance prac¬
tice can be judged by the criterion of taste —but how is taste itself to be
evaluated? After all, in Mozart’s day, or Rameau’s, or Handel’s, audi¬
ences talked a good deal during performances and composers were un¬
surprised, and often unbothered, by the habit. Does this mean that, in
essaying the “faithful” presentation of their music, we must rush about
our concert halls enjoining inattention, for all the world like Erik Satie
crying “Parlez, parlez/” in his Parisian theater lobby when the public
 20
Conductors on Conducting

frustrated the very purpose of his musique d’ameublement (“furniture

music”) by politely listening instead of talking through it as was the
usual practice? Or should we, more self-confidently, conclude that in
this matter, at any rate, we have reached a loftier stage of musical cul¬
ture, and act on the conclusion? There is evidence that, for all or most
of the nineteenth century, second and third presentations of the same
thematic material within a single composition were taken progressively
faster than its initial statement. Does this mean that we must follow a
practice that may well seem to us haphazard and disruptive, or should
we, again, fearlessly adopt a different—and in twentieth-century eyes
“higher” —principle of formal unity?

Authenticity is, indeed, a complex concept, and the saddest

aspect of most contemporary critical comment on the supposed dichot¬
omy between “subjective” and “objective” styles of interpretation is its
failure to grapple with —or even apparently to notice —the paradox.
Most damagingly is this the case in much discussion of nineteenth-cen¬
tury music in twentieth-century performance. For the other difficult
question a modem conductor has to tackle is: How far must the old
laissez-faire approach be discounted in performing music of the nine¬
teenth century and later? And in this area, it seems to me, justice has sel¬
dom or never been rendered to the evidence.
Granted Harnoncourt’s important qualification about the
“ideal” interpretation kept always in the composer’s and performer’s
minds, contemporary accounts overwhelmingly discredit the view that,
as eighteenth century passed into nineteenth, a long-established tradi¬
tion of interpretative freedom suddenly disappeared. Certainly per¬
formers were now increasingly seen as servants of the newly exigent
composers’ ideas. But a servant is not a slave, and almost all nineteenth-
century comment suggests that a composer of the period would have
been profoundly dissatisfied with a performance that did not give some
rein to the interpreter’s feelings, judgment, and taste.
The opposite view does occasionally surface, as in one or two
descriptions of Berlioz’s conducting, and in Verdi’s tart remark, “I do
not allow either singers or conductors to create.” But most of the excep¬
tions are no more than apparent. Weingartner and, in his later years,
Richard Strauss are commonly represented as apostles of the
“objective” school, especially in regard to their supposed rejection of
tempo modification along Wagnerian lines. Yet the very words that
Weingartner used to castigate the Wagner school as Hans von Biilow
 21
Introduction

personified it—“Where a modification of the tempo was necessary to

get expressive phrasing, it happened that in order to make this modifi¬
cation quite clear to his hearers he exaggerated it” —show that he did
not reject the principle of modification, but only its injudicious appli¬
cation. Exactly the same is true of Strauss’ recommendation, “Any
modification of tempo made necessary by the character of the piece
should be carried out imperceptibly, so that the unity of tempo remains
intact.”
The emphasis differs. But the assumption underlying these
words (mirrored very closely by what Carlo Maria Giulini says here) in
no way contradicts Weber’s formulation of the point: “There is no slow
tempo without passages that demand a quicker motion to avoid any im¬
pression of dragging. And there is no presto that does not demand, in
contrast, a quieter delivery of certain parts, so as not to impede the
means of expression with too much zeal.” Beethoven, even in providing
a metronome marking for his song “Nord oder Sud”, immediately qual¬
ifies it—“But this must be applicable only to the first measures, for feel¬
ing also has its tempo, and this cannot be entirely expressed in this
figure”; and his pupil Anton Schindler’s description of a rehearsal of the
Second Symphony, where Beethoven required eight “bendings” of tem¬
po within twenty measures of the slow movement, is one of several ac¬
counts that confirm the composer-performer’s extreme elasticity of
time. Where Weingartner and Strauss are concerned, moreover, we for¬
tunately possess still more concrete evidence in the shape of recordings
to explode any remaining notion that these conductors eschewed mod¬
ification of tempo.
The amusing—or, depending on one’s viewpoint, reassuring
— thing is that, even when they think they are being most strict, con¬
sciously “objective” conductors with true musical gifts cannot help
yielding in some degree to the urge toward expressive freedom they the¬
oretically disapprove of. Bernard Shore, leader of the orchestral violas
when Toscanini rehearsed and performed Beethoven’s Pastoral Sym¬
phony in London during the 1930s, relates in his book Sixteen Sym¬
phonies how the conductor insisted at the start of the first movement:
“The violins, in time, no ritenuto, no ritenuto to the pause!” Yet, at any
rate on disc (and he recorded the work more than once), Toscanini
never succeeded in giving that opening phrase without a breath of tem¬
po relaxation in the third measure. Try as he thought he should, he was
unable to deny the music’s nature, and his own. Fortunately for those of
us whose delight it is to hear them at work, if conductors are not slaves,
 22
Conductors on Conducting

they are not machines either. The tension between Toscanini’s dog¬
matic opinions about music and his ultimately uncrushable feeling for it
may or may not lead to certain conclusions about the total artistic value
of his work. But what is more relevant here is the evident parallel be¬
tween that tension, in the interpretative sphere, and the contradiction
between the theory and the practice of a composer like Stravinsky: If
music is, as he claimed, “by its very nature, powerless to express any¬
thing at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological
mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc.,” then what is the direction
espressivo doing in his scores? And it was the prescriptive Stravinsky
who observed, as Colin Davis relates in this book, “the metronome
mark is only a beginning,” just as the more “Romantically”-oriented
Sibelius remarked to Sir Adrian Boult: “If ever your musical instinct tells
you to do something different from my markings, please obey your in¬
stinct.”
These points all illustrate the thorny, treacherous nature of
any judgments about the opposition of objective and subjective ap¬
proaches. No facile distinction can be drawn between the two. Every¬
where, paradox lies in wait to trip the unwary critic. Composers,
almost all of them, have plainly taken it for granted that the score can
never fully represent the work—“the most important element in music,”
as Mahler put it, “is not to be found in the notes” —and that some cre¬
ative contribution must accordingly be made by the performer, even if
that contribution amounts to no more than an attempt to bridge the gap
between cold print and the original inspiration. In that context, what
the “objectivists” have forgotten is that an attempt to render the score,
and no more than the score, implies a subtraction from the composer’s
idea that can be just as damaging as any so-called “subjective” addition.
George Szell, as quoted by Harold Schonberg, observed that Toscanini
“wiped out the arbitrariness of the post-Romantic interpreters” and
“did away with the meretricious tricks and the thick encrustation of the
interpretive nuances that had been piling up for decades.” No doubt
meretriciousness was obtruding in some quarters, and it may well have
been time for a swing of the pendulum. It is certainly possible to draw
such a conclusion from some of Willem Mengelberg’s recordings. Curi¬
ously, though, as Bernard Haitink points out in his chapter, it was not
until the late 1930s—well after Toscanini had begun to apply his purga¬
tive—that Mengelberg, then in his mid-sixties and grown blase, began
to “play with” the music in the arbitrary manner that Wagner himself
had warned against when he spoke of the “wilful introduction of ran-
 23
Introduction

dom nuances of tempo.” The trouble with pendulums, in any case, is

their intrinsic inability to stop at midpoint; they always swing too far.
Granted that the cleaning process applied by Toscanini, and by his
younger colleagues Fritz Busch, Fritz Reiner, and Szell, had its salutary
side, it still suffered from the negative, merely subtractive, aspects of all
puritanical movements. String portamento for instance —that expres¬
sive glide usually from a low note to a higher one —was not an
arbitrary excrescence that had been destructively imposed on
nineteenth-century composers until Toscanini freed them from it. It
was an accepted interpretative resource that composers expected to find
in performances of their music. Its deletion was thus a clear case of
damaging subtraction.
In the past few years, after a few decades dominated by the
Toscanini approach, a new generation of conductors has begun to ex¬
plore again the difficult but rewarding ground of interpretative flexi¬
bility. As the physical presence of Wilhelm Furtwangler and Toscanini
(who died in 1954 and 1957 respectively) recedes into the past, more and
more musicians seem to be coming to feel that the former’s contri¬
bution, building directly on the tempo modification principle of the
nineteenth-century German school, was the more centrally valuable of
the two. Daniel Barenboim in particular, a self-avowed disciple of
Furtwangler, has turned to fresh and powerful effect the reevaluated
principles of modification and of a rhythmic treatment that emphasizes
the broader melos rather than the individual beat. In some recent
recordings, he has started also to reintroduce portamento. It is enter¬
taining to observe the mental gymnastics of critics unable to deny the
musical conviction of the results, as they strive to reconcile their satis¬
faction with years of adherence to the school of strict tempo and no por¬
tamento.
Cutting and retouching are two further areas of conductorial
activity where categorical judgment is elusive. In the matter of cutting,
it may seem easy enough to take—and I do personally take —the view
that the practice is simply inadmissible. If you care enough about a piece
to want to perform it, and if the composer whose signature it bears is
going to be judged by what the audience hears, then he deserves the
courtesy of being judged on the work as he proportioned it rather than
having some reshaped version foisted on his defenseless name. Among
composers, Arnold Schoenberg put the case against cutting as well as it
has ever been put in a letter written in 1918 to Alexander von Zemlin-
sky: “Brevity and succinctness are a matter of exposition... A work
 24
Conductors on Conducting

that has been shortened by cutting may very well give the impression of
being an excessively long work (because of the exposition) that is too
short in various places (where it has been cut).” A century earlier,
Berlioz castigated Habeneck for “correcting Beethoven by suppressing
an entire repeat” in the finale of the Fifth Symphony, thus throwing
baleful light on the view held by many performers today that by
Beethoven’s time, let alone Berlioz’s, repeats were merely a matter of
convention whose observation was happily left to the interpreter’s
discretion.
Yet here again we must tread carefully. The purist view is fair¬
ly held, provided we admit once more that holding it is a partly subjec¬
tive decision. For practice has always varied on such points. The same
Berlioz did not hesitate to conduct programs that included isolated
movements from the same Beethoven symphony—and indeed from his
own works. The famous story about the 1806 premiere of Beethoven’s
Violin Concerto, in which the soloist, Franz Clement, is said to have
played a piece of his own (with the violin upside down!) between move¬
ments may be apocryphal. But it is clear that, at the time, the integrity of
the work as a whole was a novel and still fragile concept.
Interpolations were no less common than omissions in Mo¬
zart’s time, as they had been in Handel’s. Billow regarded Wagner’s
wholesale revamping of Mozart’s Don Giovanni not as desecration but
as the sincere practical expression of one master’s admiration for an¬
other’s work. As for abbreviations of the more conventional and less
ambitious kind, the supposed literalist Weingartner considered “judi¬
cious cutting an artistic duty that greatly enhances the aesthetic pleasure
to be obtained.”
At least as far as their own work is concerned, composers
since the middle of the nineteenth century have been more or less unani¬
mous in deploring cuts. But whatever we consider ought to happen, it
would be a mistake to believe that cutting is unknown in contemporary
practice. Another literalist, Szell, used inferior (and cut) editions of
Bruckner symphonies on the explicit ground that Bruckner was a com¬
poser of less than infallible judgment who needed help. Szell also cut a
substantial passage in the finale of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra with
the somewhat sketchy justification that the composer had asked his ad¬
vice on the scoring. Twentieth-century French conductors traditionally
make a small cut in the Berlioz Requiem. Jean Martinon used to excise
several pages from the slow movement of the Fantastic Symphony. Ask¬
ed about this cut after a Chicago performance in the late 1960s, he con-
 25
Introduction

ceded frankly that he had accepted it without question from Charles

Munch, and by the time he recorded the work near the end of his life he
had restored the disputed passage. Sir Thomas Beecham, admired
Mozartian as he was, inflicted cuts of the most arbitrary kind on even
such a masterpiece as the Sinfonia Concertante for violin, viola, and or¬
chestra k. 364.
Beecham again comes readily to mind on the still more diffi¬
cult question of retouched orchestration. “The entire work has been
reorchestrated by me” was his bland and unblushing final thrust in in¬
troducing the recording he made, late in life, of something resembling
Handel’s Solomon. (The same performance caused last-minute prob¬
lems for the record company concerned; the sleeve department
discovered only a week or two before its release that the scene they had
chosen for illustration on the front of the box had been omitted in
Beecham’s romp through the work, and a hasty substitution had to be
made.) But Beecham’s thorough transformation of Handel’s orchestral
sound does not differ in attitude—though it may in subtlety of execu¬
tion—from Mozart’s in composing new accompaniments for Messiah
to suit the taste and conventions of his own time.
What makes the question of retouching a more equivocal
problem than that of cutting is that, instead of the potentially fixed ele¬
ment of a work’s composed proportions, we are here dealing with
aspects of performance that are subject to inevitable change. Instru¬
ments themselves change. So do playing techniques, and so, for that
matter, do concert halls, which are almost all much bigger now than
they were before 1800. To some extent it is possible to reverse these
changes, and groups like Harnoncourt’s Concentus Musicus in Vienna
have demonstrated vividly that a return to old instruments, old playing
techniques, and old pitch —for eighteenth-century music, often a semi¬
tone or more below standard modern pitch —can have a revelatory
effect in the performance of music written before 1850.
At the same time it is wise to remember, again, that changes of
instrumentation were not even considered matter for comment before
the Classical period. The celebrated “Bach” Concerto in A Minor for
four harpsichords is not his at all, but simply an arrangement of
Vivaldi’s B Minor Concerto, op. 3, no. 10, for four violins. And when
we come to Beethoven, and a problem passage like the transition phrase
in the first movement of the Fifth Symphony (which, heard first on
horns in the exposition, sounds almost comically absurd transferred to
bassoons in the recapitulation, though Colin Davis disagrees with me),
 26
Conductors on Conducting

the conclusion of the retouchers may well be the one more truly faithful
to the spirit of Beethoven’s work. We can be reasonably sure that Bee¬
thoven would have written the passage for horns again on its second ap¬
pearance if they had been able to play it; thus, now that horns have
valves that enable them to play in all keys, the sensible course is to
transfer the recapitulation phrase to them and avoid bathos. At any
rate, conductors of all schools, both those associated with interpreta¬
tive freedom like Wagner, Mahler, Nikisch, and Furtwangler and those
more literally inclined like Weingartner, Toscanini, Ansermet, and
Colin Davis, have at various times either declared themselves in favor of
the principle of limited retouching or, in their performances, acted on it.
What will, I hope, have emerged from our investigations is
that there are no simple answers to the stylistic problems of conduct¬
ing. Whether the question be one of tempo, or phrasing, or instru¬
mental execution, or orchestration, or fidelity to form, individual
judgments always have to be made. What they must rest on is a knowl¬
edge of the style of a period, and of the composer in question. It is the
purpose of the following chapters to examine the way eight leading
conductors of our time have tackled these problems in the works of
some of the great composers from Handel to Ives.
CONDUCTORS
on
CONDUCTING
 James
Levine
on,
Verdi and
Mozart
METROPOLITAN OPERA ASSOCIATION
RCA RECORDS
Still in his mid-thirties, James Levine can look back on a list of mu¬
sical achievements that would represent an unlikely aspiration for
many an excellent conductor twenty or thirty years his senior. His
center of operations is the Metropolitan Opera in New York City,
where he was Principal Conductor for three years before becoming
Artistic Director in 1976. He has also been Music Director of the
Ravinia Festival, near Chicago, since 1973, and held a similar post
from 1974 to 1978 at the May Festival in Cincinnati, the city where
he was born in 1943. Apart from an annual engagement at the
Salzburg Festival, and two or three guest-conducting appearances on
each side of the Atlantic each season, these responsibilities represent
the sum of his current activities more or less completely. For unlike
most of his colleagues, Levine, who spent six apprentice years (from
1964 to 1970J as George Szell’s assistant in Cleveland, is totally com¬
mitted to the artistic value of continuity. Seeing what he regards as a
decline in interpretative—though not in technical— standards of or¬
chestral performance over the past two or three decades, he blames it
on the itinerant nature of many modern conductors’ careers. He has
been fortunate, deservedly so, in acquiring two or three firm bases at
an unusually early age, and wise in allotting at least seven months of
each year to the Met alone.
If that emphasis on staying in one place suggests any hint of
sloth, the dynamism of a career that includes teaching and piano
playing as well as conducting counters it, and the circumstances of
my conversation with Levine are evidence enough in themselves of
his extraordinary ebullience. At the time this book was being
planned, I had been asked to interview him for the 1978 edition of
International Music Guide, and it was agreed that we would meet
during a short visit on which he was to conduct and record in Lon¬
don. Knowing from our previous encounters what a good, spon¬
taneous talker he is, I decided not to raise the question of a further

33
 34

interview on Verdian style until we met. A crowded recording

schedule left the late evening after his second concert as the only
possible time —he was to leave London the following day. We
repaired from the Royal Festival Hall to his room at the Savoy Hotel,
ordered a meal, and, close to midnight, began talking about his
career and future plans. The IMG interview was not finished until
2. a.m. I decided to ask him whether we could meet some other time
to talk for the book, if he was willing to be a part of it. “Why not
now?” was the response. Would he like, I wondered, to look at a
few preliminary questions I had jotted down? “No, let’s just talk, and
if you don’t get what you want we’ll set up another time later.” And
so the following conversation was taped between 2 and 3:30 a.m. on
February 14, 1978.
 T here are two kinds of music that are hardest to do:
nineteenth-century Italian opera and eighteenth-
century symphonic. No matter what difficulties are
posed by twentieth-century works, Mahler, Berlioz, the performance
practice of Baroque music, and so on, for a modern conductor with a
modern orchestra the hardest styles are Mozart-Haydn-Schubert on
one side and Verdi-Puccini-Mascagni-Giordano on the other. In both
cases, it’s because the notes are harmonically very simple, because the
objective technicalities are few, because the music looks pretty metrical,
and yet with all this, everything about the style is utterly intrinsic.

Are we speaking here about the combination of things that you

see in the score and a whole ineffable tradition that has accreted?
What do you mean when you say the style is “intrinsic”?
There’s something in those aural phenomena that’s very difficult to put
into words. But let’s assume that one has here a very talented musician,
a very sensitive human being with a lot of skill. It’s easier for him to con¬
duct Mahler than to conduct Verdi. We’re now assuming that he has no
intrinsic relationship to the style of Verdi as opposed to Mahler; we’re
saying he’s an American. Mahler tells you exactly what to do. The
culture from which a Mahler symphony comes is clear, almost tangibly
clear, as is the emotional content, the musical material itself. The score
is a conductor’s road map. Don’t misunderstand me— a lot of people
miss it. But I was now assuming that we’re dealing with a very bright,
sensitive, talented, perceptive person. Those same perceptions per se
won’t help him when he is looking at a Verdi score.

Are you saying that, next to Mahler with all his complications
— his complexities and complexes, his clearly present-day con¬
sciousness—Verdi is a much more mysterious phenomenon,
spiritually and artistically?

35
 36
Conductors on Conducting

Yes. I think there are certain composers who were the great, total, cos¬
mic geniuses. There are certain composers who had everything—like
people are fond of saying about Shakespeare, for instance. There are
certain artists who have this phenomenal world-totality in this one per¬
son. And to me, the two composers who certainly have it to the greatest
degree are Mozart and Verdi. Now, of course, you have to be into Ver¬
di to understand why a person would say that, and there’s a whole
group of musicians in the world who think that the greatest thing that
ever happened is the late Beethoven quartets and that Verdi is a tub of
shit. I feel sorry for them, because I think the late Beethoven quartets are
fantastic, but I think Verdi is equally fantastic, and I’m sorry that other¬
wise very bright, perceptive people will put something down out of
ignorance.

Or maybe out of hearing inadequate performances.

Well, that’s also true. The essential point is the difference between mu¬
sic that gives you back and music that you grow tired of. There’s certain
music which, the more you do it, the more you must do it, the better
you do it, the more involved you get in it. There’s other music, the more
you do it the thinner it becomes, the emptier it is, the more it doesn’t
feed you back.

As a critic I discovered, as I went on reviewing The Rite of

Spring, that the better the performance was, the less I had to say
about it. That, to my mind, marks it off from great music. With
great music, the better the performance the more insufficient, as a
critic, you find your space.
That’s very funny. I gave up doing The Rite of Spring as a guest conduc¬
tor because it was solving the same problems all over again —once you
have a properly organized performance of The Rite of Spring, it’s finish¬
ed. Whereas the simplest Mozart symphony, with a different orchestra,
with the same orchestra another time... Just change one singer in the
cast of a Mozart opera and you have a whole new piece. You cannot get
all the facts down in the right proportion in one performance, and that’s
thrilling, it’s just thrilling. And that’s why we get up in the morning and
go back there trying to do justice to those pieces.
I assume (and it’s good to say this in front of a person like
you who doesn’t like Wagner) that almost everyone would agree that
Wagner was a man of undoubted musical creativity, genius, talent,
whatever words you want to use, never mind what his other problems
 37
James Levine on Verdi and Mozart

were. The point is, a conductor’s involvement with Wagner’s music

sooner or later is debilitating and you have to leave it alone for awhile.
Sooner or later it makes you tired, it makes you worn out, it makes you
frustrated. After conducting ten Lohengrins—even though I love the
piece — I was very glad to stop. After conducting ten Otellos all I want to
do is start back at the beginning and conduct ten more. What produces
that feeling is, ultimately, the kind of human being Verdi was as op¬
posed to the kind of human being Wagner was, and this is utterly intrin¬
sic in the music.
In Wagner and Strauss we have the two greatest examples of
people who had something missing in their persons which shows in
their music, which can only be noticed accurately if you live with that
music all the time. You see, the listener can buy a ticket to hear Walkiire
and go and have a great experience and then leave and go on to other
things. But those of us who in order to put on Walkiire rehearse it for a
month and then do a run of performances, we know that when we
come to the end of that we have given it everything and it has only given
us so much.
With Strauss you have a different phenomenon. Take a score
like Rosenkavalier, for example. It’s a mind-boggling score. The idea of
that score before the blank pages were filled is mind-boggling, the idea
that these two guys wrote a totally original work of operatic art, they
made up the thing, they wrote the libretto, the plot, the music, the or¬
chestration, everything, and it’s an absolutely singular work of art, no
question. It’s probably Strauss’ best piece. But whether one agrees on
that or not, take any of Strauss’ best works and you find that with all
that extraordinary invention, with all the fullness everywhere else, at
the very center of the music it’s empty. You conduct, let’s say, a run of
Salomes, ten or twelve of them. Halfway through, despite the
undeniable, brilliant originality and eclat of the piece, you’re doing the
job. That’s all I can say. You go and conduct Salome, you go and con¬
duct, do it, and it sits there, and the audience claps, and you go home.
But you cannot walk into the pit to conduct anything from Rigoletto to
Otello to the Requiem to Ballo to I vespri siciliani without that you are
transported within the first sixty seconds until the evening is over. Even
if you think you’re tired of it, when the next performance starts you’re
refreshed, like back to square one. The same thing happens when you
conduct a lot of things, but in the theater most of us agree that the
pillars of the operatic repertoire from that standpoint are Mozart and
Verdi.
 38
Conductors on Conducting

You could say it’s a moral thing, in the sense that there’s a
wholeness in the approach of these people to the human soul. We’re
talking about the fact—you can read it in Verdi’s letters, you can hear it
in any one of these pieces—that there is the most just proportion possi¬
ble in that human being and it is manifest in that human being’s music,
the right proportions of everything. That’s what makes it so whole and
so cosmically renewable.

It would follow that what one would have to seek out in per¬
formance is the avoidance of inappropriate stress, the avoidance
of inappropriate extremity or extremism, and the perfection of
proportion.
Yes. If you perform The Marriage of Figaro, for instance, you would
surely say that here is one of the wholest, most perfectly proportioned
things that ever happened. And nothing hurts it more than having one
of its facets shoved down your throat while another remains covered
up. Nothing hurts it more than a stage director who decides he’s bloody
well going to show you that this was seething revolution —that finishes
it, goodbye, let’s go home. Nothing hurts it more than a stage director
who is going to show you that these people are all charming. Nothing
hurts it more than that they’re going to show you the broadside version
of each character, that Figaro resents being a servant and that the Count
is a booby. The beauty of this situation is that it is so well balanced be¬
tween the radiant facets, the everyday facets, the individual facets, the
individual specifics, and, yes, the seething revolution. Everything is
there, and it must be there, and you must see it and hear it and feel it and
have one of those whole-world experiences.
Every word I just said applies to Falstaff. I think if I were
pinned to the wall, if somebody said to me that I would die if I didn’t
name my favorite opera, I would probably say Falstaff. It’s crazy
because I could name twenty favorite operas and support them all, but I
think the ultimate one is Falstaff. I think Falstaff may be the one most
perfect work of operatic art.

What are the things you have to do when you begin to prepare a
Falstaff performance, and how do you do them?
There can almost never be a good Falstaff performance. Almost every
Falstaff performance will be in some way a catastrophe, because this is
one of those total challenges that is almost never met. First of all, there’s
the standard problem (all art works have it, but the great art works have
 39
James Levine on Verdi and Mozart

it up the bucket): You’ve got to be absolutely rehearsed and timed and

disciplined down to the last thirty-second note, and the whole thing
must unwind as if it was being composed while it was played.
I will never forget the first time I saw Alfred Lunt and Lynn
Fontanne on the stage, and I knew that’s what a musical performance
should be like. Knowing theater people as I did, I knew how the Lunts
rehearsed, and I knew that Alfred Lunt rehearsed where and how he
was going to scratch his left buttock when he said so-and-so, and there
was not so much as a half-step or a half-inflection that hadn’t been
rehearsed down to the last degree. But boy, when they played it, it
looked like that was the only way it could ever be, and it was spon¬
taneous as hell, and you could go and see it twelve times and it was
spontaneous twelve times.
That’s what a performance of Falstaff has to be. It has to be a
mirror of a whole world of life. It poses tremendous rhythmical disci¬
pline problems. Each must be solved. The sonorities have to sound a
certain way, they have to be luminous and radiant.

This “certain way” is a specifically Verdian way, and it’s a

specifically Falstaff way. What makes it that?
I know, it’s difficult. But let’s put it this way: You can find an orchestra,
in Central or Eastern Europe perhaps, that has a fairly warm sound,
and that plays in a nice, amabile way; and suppose we disciplined the
hell out of them, they would still not sound like Falstaff. And then there
are German and Austrian singers, superb performers in other areas of
the repertoire, who sound quite wrong in Verdi, or in Mozart’s Italian
operas. The actual sound of the voice placement and the Italian pro¬
nunciation may be wrong. I’ve heard Leporellos who will take one of
these little witty Latin jokes and grin in a manic Prussian way, and I just
want to crawl into my chair. I think that is absolutely not what Mozart
and da Ponte meant at all. Is it an ethnic point? I’m afraid it may be, a
little. I say “I’m afraid” because I guess that’s not nice, but it may be
true.

Not only not nice, but where does it leave you as an American?
That’s interesting, because as an American you can approach various
European styles without the bias of being from some European coun¬
try, which I find rather important.
But let’s talk about good Verdi. The best recorded Verdi from
a conductor is, a million miles ahead, Toscanini’s, without any ques-
 40
Conductors on Conducting

tion. There’s no Verdi subsequently that gets anywhere close. Now

there’s some good Verdi by other conductors, but only because they’re
dealing with perceptive singers. I don’t think Serafin, de Sabata, Ca-
puana, Votto, Cleva, whomever you want, de Fabritiis, were in
Toscanini’s class. But I do think some of them did good performances
of Italian pieces when they had a particularly fortuitous and perceptive
cast. In my time, for instance, I’ve seen Gabriel Bacquier—who is not
Italian — do a Fra Melitone in Forza which is the best I ever heard or saw
and is a phenomenal total performance. I’ve recorded Forza with
Placido Domingo singing Don Alvaro, and I think his is probably a bet¬
ter performance of that role, front to back, than anyone else has ever
done in the history of recordings. I think the same is true of Albanese’s
Violetta in Toscanini’s Traviata. The same is true of Vinay in
Toscanini’s Otello. The same is true of that whole Salzburg 1937 pirate
record of Falstaff, with Toscanini conducting. The same is true of that
NBC Symphony-Carnegie Hall Verdi Requiem with Nelli, Barbieri,
Siepi, and di Stefano. For style, none of the Requiems that have been
done since get anywhere close.
It’s very difficult for me to put into words what the stylistic
issue is. It’s elements of a certain kind of projection of the text—not on¬
ly the meaning of the text, but the sound of the text. It has to do with a
certain balance between pointing on a detail and over-pointing—but
this is so with all music. It has to do with finding a tempo which is
faithful to the often classical structure of the musical idea, at the same
time as it is faithful to the pace of the words. This is the question of these
whole works of Verdi and Mozart, where the marriage between the
dramatic idea or philosophic idea, the text, and the music makes a
perfect proportion if you do it right. And there are many other such
works. I think Wozzeck is one. I think Rosenkavalier is damned close to
being one of them. I think, whatever someone else’s subjective dislikes
may be, Tristan is another of those works. But there’s a totality in the
whole prolific output of a Verdi or a Mozart where you’re dealing with
this whole human being in every work.
It’s very hard for me to say what conducting this is. But sit
with a score some time, and go get every recording you can of the last-
act Traviata prelude, and listen to them all, and look at the score, and
then play the Old Man’s. I think you’ll find it a jaw-dropping ex¬
perience, a mind-blowing experience. I mean, the fiddles, they’re cry¬
ing, they’re sobbing, they’re singing. It sounds like some sort of cosmic
Italian vocal phenomenon manifest in those sixteen NBC Symphony
 41
James Levine on Verdi and Mozart

first violins. The way they connect—they use every legato in the book,
from a sharp shift to a smooth glissando slide, in exactly the right way,
in exactly the right places, with exactly the right amount of gauge and
judgment and color. The accompaniment is perfectly balanced. It
neither holds the melody in a straitjacket nor lets it go all over the place.
The dramatic hopelessness of the situation is there in the piece and
Toscanini gets that across. The cantilena quality of the melody, he gets
that across. But then, he had a virtuoso violin section of people who
came together at just the right time to make it easier for him to produce
that, and he knew exactly what to ask them to do. All of the other per¬
formances you’ll hear of it are either too dissected, too square, not
dramatic enough, not legato enough, not with the right spinto kind of
tone-quality. This is only to try to clarify how complex the composer’s
challenge is and how rarely it is ideally met.
Let’s take something we both know from a certain stand¬
point. You go and you hear a Mozart performance, and here comes a
performance in which the tempos have just the right amount of forward
motion, but they are poised. The string sound is luminous and radiant
but precise and clear and it crackles, but when it’s precise and clear and
it crackles it doesn’t sound shut down and pinpointed and tight, and
when it’s let to sing out it doesn’t get out all floppy and lose its tensility.
And when the winds play, it sounds fresh and it sounds open, and you
can hear all the notes individually but you can also hear them as a
chord, and each telling little thing that happens in the orchestration
that’s like a new horizon happens and it’s full of wonder. And now
comes another performance where the tempos are—they’re not wrong,
you can’t say they’re wrong, and you can’t say they were not playing
together, and you can’t say the sound was ugly, none of that. And yet
the rhythm has no buoyancy, the sound is a little drab, the winds come
in and it lacks luminosity, it lacks radiance, it lacks transparency, it
lacks glow. It doesn’t smile. What an asinine thing to try to say! But
nonetheless it’s true, and when you have that experience, you ex¬
perience it as a loss of style, do you not? An absence or a lack of style.
Some singer comes out and sings “Deh vieni, non tardar’’’ from
The Marriage of Figaro and she sings clean pitches, and she pronounces
the words all right, and she looks charming, and every note is a sort of
white vibrato-less hoot, and it’s not really legato, and it all sounds like
there’s breath leaking out the sides, and she is famous, and the audience
passes out with joy like it’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened,
right? I’m sorry, for me it’s like the emperor’s clothes. I sit there and
 42
Conductors on Conducting

listen and I’m sorry, all I hear is it sounds like interplanetary space com¬
munication, like a coffee percolator. I just can’t listen to it. But people
are dropping dead left and right, it’s the greatest thing since sliced
bread, and I think, “Where am I?”
People ask, “What do you think is great Mozart singing?”
Well, I think the way Lisa della Casa sang “Mi tradi” in the old Furt-
wangler film of Don Giovanni was great Mozart singing. I think the
way Erna Berger sang Constanze in The Abduction from the Seraglio is
great Mozart singing. I think the way Eleanor Steber sang Fiordiligi
in Cost fan tutte is great Mozart singing. It’s just that when you get to
stylistic issues, if I listen to someone sing “Deh vienif I want the sound
to be warm and free, and I want the Italian to be flavorful and sincere
and warm, and I want the pitches to be connected legato in tune with¬
out a vibrato-less white hoot, and I want, when the sound vibrates, for
it not to sound spinto and pressured, but for it to vibrate freely. And
when I hear it I’ll know I have what I want, and when I don’t hear it I ex¬
perience it as an absence of the correct style.

And when you start conducting a Verdi opera, you must have a
method of searching for the corresponding things.
Well, I don’t have a method of searching so much any more —I know
pretty much what I’m after (not that I achieve it very often, if ever) —
but I rehearse to produce this. When I work with a singer in a room,
when I work with an orchestra alone, and when I start having stage re¬
hearsals it’s like putting together these elements. You work at each mo¬
ment in the score for a better proportion of the elements. Let’s assume
that the orchestra plays a passage very precisely but without enough
tonal radiance—you work for that. And suppose they’re making a very
nice sound, but the dramatic undercurrent to what’s happening on the
stage is not conscious enough. Or suppose you’ve got a singer who’s
singing very beautifully but it’s like she’s delivering a concert piece and
she forgets who she is. Or you have another singer who gets very well
wrapped up in what she is, but the proportion is wrong and she isn’t
singing it well. But then again I’m not talking just about Verdi; all the
things that apply here apply to all good music.
It would be very easy to say what performances have that I
find bad. For instance, I think nowadays you hear almost no good Ver¬
di and almost no good Mozart. You hear no good Verdi because people
read the score literally, and they don’t understand the stylistic conven¬
tions, which is something they also do in Mozart—that’s one thing.
 43
James Levine on Verdi and Mozart

Then you have people who fly off the deep end and they think that any
little subjective whim they want to do is in the style, which is also not
true. For the most part, the problem in performing Verdi is the same
problem as performing the work of any genius —you need a performer
who’s nearly a genius, and you almost never have one. You have a
performer who cannot possibly render the works of a brilliant, three-
dimensional human being because he’s a poor, two-dimensional, in-
grown, not very perceptive character. What can I say? When you’re
dealing with what happens in a piece like Falstaff or Otello or Don
Carlo, a most incredible three-dimensional perception is necessary, and
very few people have it, and then, even if you do have a conductor who
has it, you have to have a cast who have it and a stage director who has
it. Problem! And what’s more, no two people will ever completely agree
on all of this.

You mention the literal treatment of the score as one of the prob¬
lems. In your approach to a given production of a Verdi opera,
how much do you actually get from sources other than the score?
Much of it must come from a background of appreciation of
style through years of studying the recordings of Toscanini and
other conductors.
Indeed, and working with the most perceptive coaches I can find
around today, and working with some good old singers, like Gobbi,
whose knowledge goes back to their teachers. It’s partly that. It’s partly
continuous restudying. There are countless decisions you have to make
about where to breathe, whether to make a portamento or not, whether
there should be a parlando, whether the notes should be sung absolute¬
ly as they’re written or whether they’re shorthand for something else.
Puccini, for example, eventually developed a notation where
he wrote rhythmical values with no notes. But that doesn’t happen in
Verdi—everything has notes. Well, pretty soon you get used to the fact
that sometimes, when he writes a whole line on the same note, it’s short¬
hand for a certain kind of parlando delivery. Any perceptive Italian
singer knows this, and it’s a tradition, but it can become an exaggerated
one, where the singer parlandos everything that is dramatically in¬
teresting even when a quasi-sung delivery would be right.
It’s like on the violin: Do you make a clean shift, do you make
a big slide, do you make a small slide? What kind of legato do you use?
Leopold Mozart said you should endeavor to imitate the voice, and that
raises the question, which voice? Of course you should imitate a vocal
 44
Conductors on Conducting

style, but the question is, what proportion of vibrato, free vibrato, spin-
to pressure vibrato; a sound which is open, a sound which is covered, a
sound which has great dramatic color or a sound which remains slightly
divorced from an inflection of the word? You can analyze all these
planes and take them apart, but the fact remains, taking them apart and
making them work are two different things; that this isn’t just some con¬
certed piece, that it has a very specific dramatic intent—and all of this
within very specific details of style.
Nabokov is one of those minds I love. He wrote a work which
took him, I think, seven years on and off—he made a translation of
Pushkin’s Onegin, which is published in four huge volumes. The poem
of Onegin, of course, is short enough. The translation itself is only the
first volume. The other three volumes are notes. And notes about what?
Notes about references in the poem, word choices in the poem, deci¬
sions about translation, historical references—three volumes to this one
volume. In the preface is a sentence I adore: “In art, as in science, there
is no delight without the detail.” Ah, how true! And a big diatribe
against generalities. It’s the whole trouble with analyzing style, because
it all comes down to detail.
The first time I did Otello with Jon Vickers I had an experi¬
ence which typifies this. He and I had done Otello separately, but never
together. We scheduled a rehearsal alone. We got in a room at one
o’clock. I sat at the piano, he sat on my left straddling a chair facing me.
We did not move from that position for four-and-a-half hours —neither
of us got up to pee, neither of us strolled around the room — working on
a role that you can probably sing through in sixty minutes, a little more
maybe. People ask me, “What did you do? I mean—you know it, he
knows it.” Well, we discussed whether this line should have a little more
of this about it, and whether that breath ought to be over here instead of
over there. We spent twenty minutes discussing the interpretation of a
single line, what would have amounted, for us, to a radical difference.
I’ll tell you what it was, because it’s significant to the question
of style. When Iago first asks Otello about the handkerchief, Otello
says, “Yes, such a handkerchief as you describe I gave to her. It was my
first love-gift.” Now Verdi set this line in an almost casual way. It is not
marked piano or any other way in the score to indicate a special
dynamic (and Verdi in Otello goes all the way up to ppppp and
pppppp), and it’s not marked with a particularly slow tempo; it’s almost
like an offhand factual statement—“Yes, I know the handkerchief you
mean.” When I played this line for Jon, he sang it very softly and
 45
James Levine on Verdi and Mozart

dreamily and pianissimo and long and slow. Immediately I was taken
aback. I said, “Jon, you can’t do that, that’s a terrible distortion.” He
said, “I... I have to.” I said, “But Jon, look at the way it’s set. I know it’s
an important line, but you know, you’ve got to...it’s Verdi you’re play¬
ing.” He said, “I just don’t think it’s right.” I said, “What’s wrong with
it?” He said, “People make jokes about Otello and the handkerchief,
about how Iago made all this mischief with this handkerchief. Don’t
you see that the only way the whole rest of the opera is going to work is
if the audience understands how important that handkerchief was to
that man, if the audience understands that Otello sees before him
everything that his lifetime commitment to that woman meant when he
gave her that handkerchief? He has got to reach a point of identification
with any sensitive audience member at that moment, otherwise all this
fuss that’s going to be made over the handkerchief in Act in isn’t going
to work.” Well, we battled. I kept upholding Verdi’s way of setting the
line. Verdi obviously, with his unerring sense of performed drama,
knew that the climax of the scene comes a little later, as soon as Iago
says, “Yesterday I saw that handkerchief in Cassio’s hand,” and that’s
when Otello just blows up and they go and sing the final duet of Act n.
So Verdi is clearly throwing that line away in order to set up the next
line. But try as I might, I couldn’t get Jon to change his approach.
Ultimately, it was much more convincing in that context for him to
follow his own instinct.
 46
Conductors on Conducting

The four Verdi opera recordings James Levine has made—ha. forza del
destino, Otello, and I vespri siciliani on RCA and Giovanna d’Arco on
Angel/EMI — bear out the enthusiasms of a self-declared Toscanini dis¬
ciple, leavened by a vigilant concern for the comprehensive human
balance central to Levine’s view of Verdi. Briskness of rhythmic impulse
and care for the singing line are the most evident Toscaninian qualities.
But my feeling is that, even at this early stage of his career, Levine has
learned to allow for the needs of mortal singers more accommodatingly
than the fanatically single-minded Toscanini was ever willing to do: He
very rarely presses tempo to the detriment of a lyrical point. Levine has
not yet, as I write, recorded any Mozart. But his Brahms and Mahler
symphonies, on RCA, pertinently demonstrate the breadth of his
stylistic sympathies. In particular, the polyphonic richness of his
Brahms, and the intensity (at a bravely slow tempo) of the intermezzo
movement in the Third Symphony, show how clearly he differentiates
his approach for composers of other schools than that of Verdi.
 Nikolaus
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The Concentus Musicus of Vienna. Nikolaus Harnoncourt, third from left, stands
beside his wife, Alice.
 My meeting with Nikolaus Harnoncourt could not have taken place
at a more appropriate time. It was April 1977, the English Bach
Festival was in full swing, and London was having its most substan¬
tial encounter yet with the kind of original-instruments performance
common for more than a decade in Austria, Germany, and Holland,
but for some reason neglected until the last two or three years in
England. The Kuijken Ensemble from Amsterdam was one of the
successes of the festival. Another was the Collegium Aureum, whose
revelatory performance of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony the previous
evening provided one of our talking points.
But if 1977, as it now seems, opened the floodgates to what
might (but see below) be called “authentic” performance methods in
England, the greatest credit belongs to the twenty-four years of work
in the field, invaluably documented on records, by the Concentus
Musicus of Vienna and their Berlin-born director, Nikolaus Harnon¬
court, who pronounces his surname in the French way with the first
and last letters silent. He began his musical life as a cellist. He still
directs his ensemble from the cello or viola da gamba, and, in larger
concerted pieces or choral works, shares the conducting responsibili¬
ty with concertmaster, keyboard player, or chorus director. Speaking
impressively fluent English in his London hotel room, he was quick
to seize on a point, but never facile. Deep thought, powerful in¬
trospection, and varied learning have evidently shaped his develop¬
ment as a musician —as one might expect of a performer so closely
identified with Bach. Dogmatism, however, was refreshingly absent.
For Harnoncourt, unlike some of his more academic colleagues,
musical perception and poetic imagination are more important than
intellect, and all truly musical solutions to a stylistic problem thus
have value in his eyes.

51
 M y first problems with authentic performance arose
when, as a cello student, I had to play the Bach
suites. I had the feeling that what the famous cellists
of that day did, and what was asked of me by my teachers, was totally
inadequate for what I found in the music. As a person, I don’t blindly
accept what I’m told by my teachers without question. I had the feeling
that, certainly, the greatness of this music was beyond doubt. But when
I listened to Bach whether it was the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto with
the best pianist at the keyboard or the solo literature played by the best
violinists and cellists, I could never believe that what came across from
the stage was adequate—or authentic, or whatever one wants to call it
— in the same way as their interpretations of Brahms or Stravinsky. The
only exceptions were some of the performances of Adolf Busch and
Rudolf Serkin. When I heard their Brandenburg Concertos I felt that a
lot of things were there which they perhaps had never thought about,
but with the blind security of inspiration they had found the right way.
But I wanted to have more solid ground under my feet.

This was, presumably, at a time when not much work had been
done in the field of authentic performance practice?
It was the late 1940s and early 1950s. Perhaps at that time August Wen-
zinger was already teaching in Basel, and some groups existed in Ger¬
many and England. But we were very isolated in Vienna. I cannot
remember very much about music before the war, and after the war we
had heard nothing of such work. So I was not personally influenced by
other attempts in that direction. I was simply interested in the
background, because I already knew that the notation of music is only
an aide-memoire—it helps us to follow the composer’s ideas, but it
never answers all of our questions. I was always aware that notation
does not tell the exact pitch or length of a note, or the speed of a piece.
As for pitch, for instance, there are many systems of intonation.

53
 54
Conductors on Conducting

Depending whether one uses Pythagorean intonation, intonation based

on natural harmonics, or one of the various kinds of unequal tempera¬
ment, the differences are so great that they seriously change the charac¬
ter of the music.
I started to read whatever I could. I read all of the manuals of
performance style written during the eighteenth and nineteenth centu¬
ries, and went as far back as the Italian and Spanish tutors of the six¬
teenth century. I studied the pictures in these books, but most of all I
studied the scores. What I learned was, above all, that there was a great
change at the time of the French Revolution in the entire nature of
music, and in the way it was meant to be performed and listened to.
I think that this change, which had to do with the changes in¬
troduced by the Revolution, affected all of the arts. The result was a
new kind of music education in France based on the conservatory. This
education was now directed by the state, and not by the individual
teacher, and I would say that the tradition of what we do now, the way
we are now taught music, comes directly from the French conservatory
system. The old system was the master-pupil way, where every master
had his insights into the problems and passed them on to his pupil, but
there was no general line which had to be followed and which was im¬
plemented by a government.
In most of the works composed after that time—or after that
change, which is not always the same thing (in Beethoven, for instance,
I would say that the change comes somewhere in the middle of his life,
after the Eroica) — the most important difference is that music loses the
greater part of its speaking quality. Music is no longer built according to
the rules of language, of speech, and of rhetoric. Instead, compositions
are built up in great panels. Sound in itself—layers of sound and mix¬
tures of sound—became the foundation upon which composers built.
So, the aim of music was no longer to tell the listener something, but to
put him in a certain mood. It had to go, not through the ear and through
the brain,.but directly into the gut, into the emotions — a sensational ap¬
proach, in the literal sense of the word. This is largely a matter of
rhythmic language and of articulation. And whatever the importance of
the composer’s conception, I feel that a composer brought up in a cer¬
tain way cannot change anything. However new his ideas, it will be im¬
possible for him to write totally outside the framework of his time.

That begins to suggest an answer to the question, how far is

what makes Bach Bach something special to him, or how far, on
 55
Nikolaus Harnoncourt on Bach

the other hand, does it come out of his cultural background?

I would say that the stylistic similarities between Bach and any other
good composer of his time make themselves clearly felt in the character
of his music. Perhaps his contemporaries would not really have dis¬
tinguished him very much from among their own number. But what
makes Bach Bach is simply his genius.
There is a kind of “science” now called “musikalischer Wer-
tungsforschung.” It is the attempt to find out the value of a work of art
— to find out how good a particular piece of music is. I would say that
this new “science” is absolute junk, it is worthless, because one could
never find the measure for quality. If you compare a work by Bach with
a very good work by one of his contemporaries, you can look at the lat¬
ter and say, “Yes, this doesn’t have the same complex harmonic
development as the Bach piece.” But if you choose another work, with a
much more complex harmonic development than Bach’s, you would
say, “Bach is a little bit simpler in his harmonic development, but some¬
how his melodic line is more natural.” The only things you can get clear
in your head are such matters as the correctness of the writing, the rules
of harmonic development, and the rules of the style of his time. In all
cases, the greatest composers follow these rules in the same way that the
mediocre composers follow them. You can find the same number of
parallel fifths in the works of Bach as you can find in the works of any
other composer—well, perhaps not as many as in the works of Handel.

Because Handel was careless?

Because he didn’t care about them. Perhaps it was not so important to
him because, as long as the effect is not disturbing to the ear, this rule
makes no sense.
What one can distinguish, then, is the style of a time, the style
of a country. If you hear a piece of music you might say, “This music
was written between 1720 and 1740 in the middle of Germany.” There is
no yardstick, no measuring system, with which you can distinguish why
Bach is Bach and not, say, Telemann at his best. You can only hear it. I
would say with absolute certainty, if a piece that was wrongly at¬
tributed to Bach for many years is played to me, I know that it is not by
Bach. But I could not give a definition why I know that—it’s just simply
that I know it. It may not be the language of Bach; it may not be his
dialect. I think it would be impossible ever to find a definition of what
makes Bach unique, because at the moment you find such a definition
you could compose the way he can.
 56
Conductors on Conducting

Arising out of this, how far does it follow that you would use the
same approach in establishing the language for a performance of
a Bach work as for the performance of a Handel work or a Tele¬
mann work? Is there a difference in approach? Or is there only a
difference in content?
What must be remembered first is that, in my opinion, where any mas¬
terpiece of the past is concerned, we cannot understand it in its entirety.
We project the thinking of our own time on it. Whatever reflects our
own thinking, that part we take. It’s like a mountain —you see it from
the one side, and you don’t know what happens on the other. This, I
think, is why the history of the interpretation of masterworks like the
works of Bach changes. You can approach them from a purely aesthetic
standpoint, and just from that standpoint of direct response the music
will reveal everything, because even in this limited context the work is
already great. Then you can pass on to the formal aspect and the har¬
monic context, and in every respect the work would fulfill your needs.
In any case, I don’t believe that I have the key, as if I had found
the treasure of Heaven. I don’t have the key to translate the language of
Bach from his time to ours. I believe I know much of the musical
language of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and so with the
simpler music of Telemann or Handel I think I can find out how I
should perform it, perhaps even how one should perform it. But I don’t
demand that, I don’t believe in a general necessity of performing it in
only one way. Nor do I believe that any interpretation can claim to be
authentic. Even if you speak of “authentic” instruments —I never even
use that word to describe the old instruments we use in our perform¬
ances. I think whatever you do is twentieth century, and you use what
you regard as best for what this music is and for what it tells you.
In principle, the language of Handel or of Telemann is the
same. But when Bach uses this language to say very, very deep and com¬
plicated things, I can convey them in the same language without bring¬
ing him down to the level of contemporaries with less genius. In any
language you can express everyday conversation and very deep poetry,
but it’s still the same language of the same time. With Bach, it’s the in¬
spiration that comes out of the quality and out of the indescribable
genius of his work that must find an echo in your own sensitivity and
produce a special approach. So, a performance of Handel and of Bach
would always be very different, because your own sensitivity responds
in a different way to what is given to you by the score.
 57
Nikolaus Harnoncourt on Bach

It will come out different, then, for the paradoxical reason that
you are doing what is essentially the same thing— responding to
the particular character of the composer.
I think that everything is a paradox. I’m very distrustful —I don’t believe
in the yes-no system, because there is no question in the world that you
answer with “yes” or “no.” Every question has sixty percent yes and for¬
ty percent no, or something like that. And if you say, “You are con¬
tradicting yourself,” then I must confess I’m always contradicting
myself. I cannot do anything other than contradict myself, because I
believe in both the yes and the no, depending on the side from which I’m
approaching the problem.

You’ve written that the only real alternative to the kind of per¬
formance that you’re trying to achieve would, in your view, be a
modern performance, rather than the traditionally accepted
nineteenth-century manner of interpretation.
I wrote that ten years ago or more. But yes, theoretically, I would still
believe that.

When you consider that possibility, I suppose the reason it

doesn’t happen in any valid way is that there isn’t, in the twenti¬
eth century, a musical style in the sense that there was in the
nineteenth. Mendelssohn and his successors could approach the
problem from a nineteenth-century style because there was a
valid nineteenth-century language—but what are we to approach
it from today? Electronics? Ale atones?
There is no style; no, there is a chaos. And I think one must not say this
is a chaos just in music— it’s in all of the arts. This is the reason why we
have the whole heritage of our culture available, and why not only we
but the whole world of art asks for true understanding of the work of
the past.

Does this imply artistic decadence? Does it mean that we’re in a

silver period as opposed to a golden period?
I would say not even bronze —we are just looking back to the ruins of
our culture. I believe exactly in what Spengler says, but not only in the
history of war. Once a civilization reaches a certain point in its cyclical
development, there is no turning back, and no possibility of arresting its
decline. It’s true also in the sphere of Geistesgeschichte- the history of
 58
Conductors on Conducting

the human spirit, of philosophy, of ideas. The possibility' of producing

art is a measure of the capacity of the human spirit. Religion has a great
influence in this. And if the possibilities of the human spirit are swal¬
lowed up by the demands of technology, or dissipated in forms of
worldwide communication that were never there before, it may be there
is not enough left for the other field of human communication where art
is a great, indeed the most important, part. But this is like the aging of a
person—one can say it is very sad to become older and older, and you
would like to stay twenty-five all your life, but it is a necessity, a
historical necessity. You cannot change that, and I would not bemoan
it. And if we have lost a lot, we must have gained a lot, too. If it is a
decline, it’s the same decline as an eighty-year-old man’s. Perhaps he
cannot use his hands and cannot play tennis any more, but if he’s
healthy he has gained a lot of other things that make his age very worth¬
while.

As a student, bow did you try to bridge the gap between what
you heard in performances and what you felt sure was to be
found in the music?
I tried to do that first in my own cello playing. I aimed for the forming of
the musical phrase, not from the sense of the phrase, but from the single
word, like the forming of verbal language. As in building a spoken
phrase from a lot of words, where every word has its beginning and its
end, so you could say every tone has its inner life, its birth and its death.
But if you have a lot of single tones being born and dying, this by itself
would not make sense. The next important task is to build words from
syllables, to build sentences from words. The same curve of birth and
death is augmented from single tones to pairs of tones to groups of pairs
of tones until the first incision, which is a comma or a period or a
semicolon or a question mark, and so to a section of a musical form,
and to a whole sonata or opera or passion or oratorio, depending on the
form. This was, I think, my most important finding, as opposed to the
nineteenth-century approach which started with the long line and
neglected the individual element out of which it was built. The opposite
fault—spoiling the big line by dividing it into parts—is absolutely not
what I want, though I have often been accused of it. I am always aware
of the whole work even if it’s a four-hour opera—the architecture of the
whole work is in my mind when I build up the smallest dots. But I
believe that any line is composed of a lot of the smallest bricks. The
problem of performance is to perform the bricks in a perfect way—in
 59
Nikolaus Harnoncourt on Bach

the most perfect possible way, because perfection is never possible

— and to connect them in such a way as not to swallow the single brick
within the line, and not to swallow the line with the division of the
single brick.

In this aim, what are the most important considerations that one
brings to bear? How does the question of sonority—the use of
original instruments — relate to the other things you discover
when you’re performing?
The most important priority, after having all the knowledge that I could
achieve, is to forget everything and not to do anything with con¬
sciousness—because if I think that I have to do this or that, it cannot
become a good performance. It is like a person speaking a language — he
studies vocabulary and grammar and all that, but as long as he thinks of
those things he can never speak well or really naturally. Next come mat¬
ters like articulation, because, if you perform, you perform normally
with musicians who are not necessarily aware of these specifically
eighteenth-century factors. You have not only to explain what they
should do, but also why they should do that, because then they do it
much better than if you only say “louder,” “softer.”
Wherever I perform, I have to start with the production of a
single tone. And at this stage of performance the actual sound has no
importance at all. I think one can make very good performances with
any kind of instrument, as long as the player is familiar with his instru¬
ment and can express himself with the instrument he is playing.
I do a lot of performances with conventional instruments; I
conduct modern orchestras. But in this case I only work with the best
orchestras, because the best musicians are not inhibited —they don’t
believe that what they do is automatically the best. You can work much
better with really great musicians than with those on the middle level,
who are very, very selfish. And I have achieved results very close to what
is in my mind, and there always occurs a threshold—a moment when
the musicians feel, and I feel —when the next step would be to use the
better, the adequate instrument. In this case nobody would have to say
“authentic” instruments—they are simply more adequate. If I ask a flute
player to play softly in the low register, when he has studied all his life to
get a strong sound from his low register, or if I ask him to make different
sounds on the chromatic scale to give it more color—it is simply im¬
possible to do that on a Bohm flute, and to simulate it on a Bohm flute
would be unnatural —the player asks for an old flute, and tries to play
 60
Conductors on Conducting

that. The same with string players. It is very difficult, with a modern
bow, to get the right kind of speaking bowing. It is difficult because the
modern bow is constructed for sostenuto playing. It is possible, because
a good player, using his technique, can do a lot of unnatural things even
with a modem bow. But when he feels how natural is the Baroque bow
for this music, he changes to the Baroque bow. It’s the same with gut
strings—when he feels the way the string instrument should meld with
the wind instrument, he prefers gut strings. And on the oboe, the instru¬
ment that has to blend most with the strings, if the player uses the wider
reed of the Baroque instrument even on his modem instrument, it
sounds more reedy, it melds better with the strings. If you go on and on,
the step always comes —use old instruments. And I think that this way
is much better, because a musician who has played very well on a
modern instrument has his level: He is not willing to play badly or in a
mediocre way on an old instrument and say, “This is the instrument—I
cannot play better because old instruments are not developed technical¬
ly.” A really good player is only satisfied with first-class results. This is
one of the important things if one uses old instruments. But I would put
the pure-sound problem at most in third or fourth place, not too much
in front.

Where in the list of priorities would you put the matter of orna¬
mentation? This is really two questions in the performance of
Bach: There is the general question of how one approaches orna¬
mentation in eighteenth-century music, and then there is the con¬
sideration that Bach was a very special case. How far are
eighteenth-century conventions—for instance, the use o/appog-
giaturas in cadences — obligatory, and how far on the other hand
must the modern performer use his individual taste about them?
Eighty years ago everybody did appoggiaturas at cadences, because
Mahler had not yet forbidden it at that time. Up to the time of Mahler
every singer did the appoggiaturas naturally. He cut off a well-estab¬
lished tradition, with all its bad habits, and he cut it off with such rigor¬
ousness that it’s almost forgotten now—though for Italian singers it’s
still natural to sing appoggiaturas in the buffo operas, and they do it
without a problem.
On the general question of ornamentation and improvisation,
there are some places where ornamentation is obligatory — for instance,
the cadence trills with their appoggiaturas, which must be done, and the
composer didn’t need to write them because it was so obvious that every
 61
Nikolaus Harnoncourt on Bach

musician of his time knew it. These have to be played in Bach’s music.
This means you have to add thirty or forty trills in any cantata, with
their appoggiaturas, and to find out the length of the appoggiatura that
leads you to the trill, and there are some appoggiaturas you have to add.
Another thing is the improvisation of the continuo part,
which I think is very much misunderstood in our time. In my opinion,
continuo playing should be very modest, very tasteful. The player
should not show the abundance of his wit and make a festival of “What
will he do in the next bar?” I think a majority of English continuo
players do this all the time — I must say I would forbid them to approach
a keyboard, because I hate their playing so much, with all the scales up
and down. I have the feeling that it’s not even improvised, but written
out, because it sounds so elaborate, and it distracts from listening to
the composition. The point of a continuo is that it makes the harmonic
development understandable and the composition complete. If he is not
noticed, then he’s good; if the continuo player is noticed, I would say he
is a bad continuo player. You must hear him very well, but he must not
be noticed, he should not attract attention. This is a very complicated
subject. If they are good enough to play modest continuo, very unob¬
trusive, then their wit is so abundant that they want to do more, and if
they are so dull as to play just the simple chords, it’s bad continuo play¬
ing. I don’t believe that there are more than a handful of players today
with the ability to play a very, very subtle continuo. There are one or
two in Vienna, one or two in Holland. There must be some in
England —I would say that some of the English continuo players who
improvise too much would be very good if these musicians were
castrated a little bit.
In the other parts, I would say, Bach wrote out the real orna¬
mentation because he didn’t trust his performers to improvise. This one
can see from the accounts of the performance conditions he had to put
up with. For this reason there is no need to add ornaments —real, free
ornaments—in his music. There is only the problem of performing the
ones he has written out. In Bach’s time every musician knew that they
were ornaments and were to be played like ornaments — quasi improv-
visando, only without the freedom for the performers really to im¬
provise them. Thus, for instance, the flute part in the aria “Aws Liebe
will mein Heiland sterben,'> in the St. Matthew Passion would be played
the way an adagio of Vivaldi would have been ornamented, freely, by a
violinist or flute player of that time. The flute player who plays it in that
fashion must play it as if he were inventing it at the moment of perform-
 62
Conductors on Conducting

ance, not like an etude. This is a great problem for modern professional
musicians, to see eighth notes and thirty-seconds and sixteenths and to
play them in such a way. If they were really improvising, they would
play these values approximately and make a very free improvisation
around them; and it’s difficult—much more difficult—to play written-
out improvisations in an improvised manner than actually to improvise
them.
For real improvisation I think there is not very much room in
the work of Bach. In other works of his time, real improvisation is very
important, and if a performer is able to really improvise, I much prefer
that to written-out improvisation because one can hear the difference,
one can hear whether the brains work while he’s playing, or whether the
brains have worked in hours and hours of preparation. This is style.

In the realization of written-out ornamentation, should the per¬

formance properly differ on different occasions?
Yes, it must differ, because accelerando cannot be the same every day.
You will play the same notes, but with a different agogic approach.

All the evidence confirms your view that Bach does not demand
the same articulation always in the same passages; quite the con¬
trary on many occasions. A similar problem arises with the
tendency, particularly in English so-called “stylish” performances
of eighteenth-century music, to put in a great deal of ornamenta¬
tion in tutti orchestral and choral parts.
I think that the approach by analogy is very, very dull. If the same
musical phrase occurs very frequently—or if it seems to be the same
phrase, though really it isn’t—it sounds to me like the work of a police¬
man who determines that this place, whenever it occurs, has to be per¬
formed in the same way. It’s much more interesting, and much more in
the spirit of Bach’s time and of his own thinking, that, if he uses a
similar—even the same —phrase several times over, he gives the player
the chance to play it in four or five different phrasings, using the four or
five good possibilities (which are equally good, and each worthy of be¬
ing performed), but not using any of the thousands of bad possibilities.
To imitate a complicated ornamentation in an orchestral tut¬
ti, or in a chorus, is for me impossible. If a singer makes a very simple
improvisation, and there is an immediate imitation of this simple im¬
provisation—maybe the whole first violin group of an orchestra, say
three violins, imitate it together—this is fine. But the moment it be-
 63
Nikolaus Harnoncourt on Bach

comes complicated, or does not follow immediately after what it imi¬

tates, then I would not allow it. To add trills, as with violins imitating
the voice in Handel’s “He Was Despised” in Messiah, or to take orna¬
ments from a catalogue of fixed ornaments is no problem. I am thinking
more of Italian ornaments, imaginative ornaments that change the
melodic figuration, and these I would not allow in a tutti. In the last ten
years, unfortunately, interpretation has come to be thought the more
authentic the more kinds of ornaments are added, because it shows
knowledge of sources. I think this is a terrible abuse—and any source
that describes ornamentation describes also how terrible is the abuse of
this convention. I know of English performances of Messiah where I
can only plug my ears, because they’re so wn-English. There are no bet¬
ter singers and no better choruses than the English for performances of
Messiah, but there’s an infection of ornamentation in the country now.

There’s also the extremely empirical English attitude of being

totally satisfied with what might be called half-baked authentici¬
ty-reducing to the right number of instruments and so on, but
then playing the music in a completely nineteenth-century man¬
ner, with lots of vibrato and lots of hairpin crescendos and
decrescendos.
Yes, they take the second step before the first. This is why I think the
question of priority is so important—because it is dull to take Baroque
instruments and just to start performing with them. A player must
know why he takes such an instrument. If a modem oboe player or
violinist plays on a Baroque oboe or violin he always tries to reproduce
the sound of his modern instrument. It’s not as good, and it’s not the
same sound, so it merely sounds like a bad modern orchestra.

When a group like the Collegium Aureum plays the Eroica Sym¬
phony, one of the most exciting things to hear, in the trio of the
third movement, is the difference of timbre between the various
notes in the scale on the horns. Presumably, from what you’ve
just been saying, the un-properly trained musician, having gone
back to the natural instrument, would try to minimize these
differences. Perhaps it’s right to minimize these points to some
degree?
Yes, I think some of the players at that time tried to minimize them. But
sometimes the stopped notes, for example, are a part of the compo¬
sition, and the difference should not be minimized.
 64
Conductors on Conducting

In your performances of Bach, is it your general experience that,

when you go back to eighteenth-century instruments, problems
of balance, and indeed all sorts of problems, disappearf
Yes—as long as no new doctrine or dogma comes in. The moment a
musician works from a hypothesis that is almost a dogma, it can distort
balance and everything else. For instance, if a trumpet player thinks a
Baroque trumpet has to be played very open and very shrill and loud, he
can produce this sound very easily, but the conductor will never get the
right balance. You could not perform the B Minor Mass with trumpet
players of that kind, and there are those who play that way. And you
could not get these trumpets to match the flute and the oboe.

Are they American and English trumpet players?

No, they come from every country. One has to see that the score de¬
mands some equilibrium, and to work out what the musicians of that
time must have done to get it.

In that search, in spite of the amount of background knowledge

needed to perform eighteenth-century music, does the score itself
remain the most important single source?
Yes, in connection with the knowledge. All notation needs a kind of
direction for use. A quarter note is a quarter note in the score. But if I
have studied sources, then I understand that, though it looks like that, it
may sound totally different. It’s an orthographic problem whether one
writes a quarter note or a whole note or an eighth note. A whole note
can sound like an eighth note—but I cannot see this in the score if I do
not understand the convention, the unwritten convention, between the
musicians and the composer. Background knowledge is the key to
reading the score. And once you have the key, the score becomes the
principal source.

On the question of interpretative freedom, I wonder whether in

some of your writings, perhaps for good polemical reasons at the
time, you may not have underestimated the contribution —the in¬
dividual contribution — that the performer was expected to make
in music of the nineteenth century. You were making a valid con¬
trast between the period up to the French Revolution and the
nineteenth century, when, you argued, differences in performance
become very minimal. But contrary to the modern belief that
nineteenth-century composers indicated their intentions to
 65
Nikolaus Harnoncourt on Bach

the performer in a fairly cut and dried manner, nineteenth-

century contemporary sources seem to me to suggest that all sorts
of freedoms, particularly in matters of rubato, phrasing, and ar¬
ticulation, were meant to be employed by performers.
Maybe. I don’t want to insist on the point. I would say that the modern
performance of nineteenth-century music is sometimes far removed
from what the composers asked, and obviously, with composers since
late Beethoven, as composition became more and more autobiographi¬
cal, so the way they want their music performed is very important.
Maybe it is free in a way, but it is not as free as the earlier music is. If one
considers how accurately Schumann or Berlioz or Mahler or any other
composer, even Brahms, wrote down and tried to fix what he wanted
the performers to do, then even if a man like Beethoven wrote that he
was pleased when this violinist played that and imitated him, or Brahms
wrote that he was pleased with the way Clara Schumann or whoever
played a certain passage, I think this still represents an approach to the
best possible interpretation. In Romantic music there is always one in¬
terpretation, the ideal, which it is never possible to reach, but which is
somehow always in mind. I have no way of comparing how, for in¬
stance, Richard Strauss performed the Brahms Requiem—I don’t know
if he ever did it—and I never heard a performance of the Brahms
Requiem by Toscanini. But I know that all the conductors of our time
disregard Brahms’s tempo indications for this work totally. If one used
Brahms’s metronome markings, and I’m sure he meant what he wrote,
it would be almost twice as fast as any conductor takes it. This is
because of misinterpretation of the text, and misinterpretation of the
spirit of Romantic music, of the language of the period. “A Requiem has
to be slow”; “ ‘Selig sind, die da Leid tragen’ is a very sad meditation on
death”—but it’s the contrary!

Going back even further than that historically, how often is the
funeral march in the Eroica Symphony a march at all?
I still think it must be possible to beat it—not only to beat it, but to feel
it—in two-bar phrases of four quarter notes rather than in eighths. I
remember that many conductors said it must be possible to do that, but
not one was really able to do it, and I think I must have played it 500
times when I played the cello in the orchestra.

Coming back to Bach, may I ask you whether, in building up the

complex of the whole performance, going from single brick to
 66
Conductors on Conducting

whole work, and including old instruments —whether there is

anything you regret the loss of ? I’m thinking, for example, of the
sort of musical penetration and understanding that, in perform¬
ances of the cantatas, a really superb, mature woman singer,
with years and years of music, can bring to the solo parts that
the very best boy soloist perhaps cannot, though obviously in the
context of the original instrumental sound boys’ voices blend very
much better.
No, I would not agree about that. I would say that the very best boy is
musically at least as good as the very best woman. Reflect that Men¬
uhin, when he was twelve, did his best performance of Beethoven’s
violin concerto, and Furtwangler said that he could not imagine a better
performance of the work. He was twelve years old. He was exception¬
al. But all the really good violinists of our day who are now sixty or
seventy years old were already at their summit at ten, twelve, thirteen. I
don’t believe that music is an art where the performer’s understanding
(not the composer’s) can only come when he is too old to perform.

Provided there’s a conductor who has the knowledge?

Who explains. But I am speaking of the natural musical feeling of a very
gifted boy—I stress “very gifted” —when his vocal technique is as good
as the vocal technique of the best female soprano. I must say that
there are not many sopranos with a really very good technique — there
are not hundreds of sopranos who can sing difficult Mozart really well,
and I have never heard the Cantata no. 51 of Bach sung well by a female
or a boy soprano. I know of some boys of thirteen years —few, but
some —who are as musical as the best sopranos. They really have mu¬
sical insight—it is not just that they imitate something, but they under¬
stand, and they understand directly, much more directly than an adult.
You can communicate about music with such a boy. He understands
the solution, and the importance of tension and relaxation in harmony,
much faster than any adult. My experience is that there is no problem
beyond the lack of quantity of such musicians. But you must remember
that, in Bach’s time, boys sang until they were eighteen years old, so
there were many more boy singers. Every second boy learned singing,
so they had a reservoir of thousands of boys.

Then you have the same kind of interpretative teamwork when

you’re conducting an aria with a boy soloist as you would have
with any other soloistf
Yes.
 67
Nikolaus Harnoncourt on Bach

Why did you decide to use women soloists for your recording of
the B Minor Mass?
I decided that at the time because of the very Catholic aura of this work,
but I would not say that it was a final decision. In another performance I
would do it with boys, as I do performances with women of the St.
Matthew and St. John Passions every year somewhere. It is not a dogma
for me to use no women for Bach anywhere, or for this special work or
for that. There’s a great dispute about whether Bach ever used women
even in his secular cantatas. But for me this is a secondary question. In a
documentation series like our recordings of the Bach cantatas, I think it
is much more interesting to hear the soprano parts sung by boys, and
this is the reason we do it so. I could agree in the same way with a very
good woman singing the soprano parts, but I think it would not fit as
well in the concept of the series.

Is there any other kind of loss that you feel one just has to ac¬
cept? You’ve obviously gained so much by going back to the
original sound as far as you can establish it—do you think there
is anything that you also lose?
The best possible quality is not enough. But this is a loss that I have in
any kind of interpretation of any kind of music—it’s the loss between
my imagination of a performance and the reality. There are cases when
one can say, in a particular month, if we don’t have a good boy to sing
the soprano solo, this is a loss —I’m sorry that we don’t have the best
possible singer, or the same with any instrument. But this is not a ques¬
tion of principle, because if you work with an orchestra, and the orches¬
tra has a poor first trumpet player, you have the same problem.

A small point of this kind occurred to me when we were speak¬

ing of the contmuo, and that is your non-use of harpsichord in
the cantatas. Is this an unequivocally established matter of the in-
strumentarium in Bach’s time?
I think so. He used the harpsichord when the organ needed to be re¬
paired. Incidentally, we have now played the Vivaldi op. 8 concerti,
which includes the Pour Seasons, with just organ continuo.

The eighteenth-century organ is a very different thing from a

nineteenth-century organ, with much more incisiveness. . .
And with more sound and less noise than a harpsichord.

. . . and yet I have to confess that, the first time I heard a Bach
 68
Conductors on Conducting

cantata performed with just an organ playing the continuo and

no harpsichord, 1 was slightly disappointed—I had to discipline
myself to like it, if you know what I mean. It took me a little
time to get into it and understand.
Yes, you’re right. But I think any accommodation to a new thing begins
by being a disappointment which one must overcome. I had a very im¬
portant experience of this with my children. When they were small and
we hadn’t yet taken them to a concert, we rehearsed at home daily with
old instruments. We had no radio. So until they were six or seven or so,
our children never heard modern instruments. Once we were playing
Mozart’s oboe quartet, and we had to play it with modern instruments.
The children did not see what we were doing, because they were two
rooms away. As soon as we began — and the instruments we were using
were very good — the children were shocked, and they ran into the room
and said, “What terrible instruments are you playing?” It was a terrible
sound for them, and this is the same shock anybody has when he listens
all of his life to modern instruments and then for the first time hears old
instruments. Somehow it is the same shock you had when you missed
the harpsichord. With this kind of shock, I think it’s just a question of
accustoming yourself somehow, and then trying the opposite again and
asking yourself, “Is it still a good thing, or has it changed now?” A Ger¬
man lady said once, “You board a ship and do not notice that it’s mov¬
ing away from the land — and after a while you are unable to get back to
land because the ship is too far away.” The same thing can happen to
musicians. First he dislikes what we do, then he starts to like it, and then
he tries to go back to what he liked before, and he never likes it again.
 69
Nikolaus Harnoncourt on Bach

It is worth noting that, in the continuing Telefunken Das alte Werk

series of the Bach cantatas, no. 51 ("Jauchzet Gott/’discussed near the
end of the chapter) has been recorded not by Harnoncourt but by
Gustav Leonhardt, who shares the direction of the series with him. But
Harnoncourt has already contributed more than thirty cantatas, and his
recordings, together with those he has made of the St. Matthew and St.
John Passions, the B Minor Mass, the Christmas Oratorio, and the
suites and concertos, constitute the most substantial and —because
they are so musically rewarding—persuasive body of evidence on disc
for the validity of the original-instruments performance school. Har¬
noncourt makes it clear that he considers interpretative, and particular¬
ly ornamental, freedom more relevant to the performance of Baroque
composers other than Bach, and what this means in practice may be
observed from his recordings (also on Telefunken) of Vivaldi’s Quattro
stagioni, Handel’s Belshazzar, various concertos and suites by Handel
and Telemann, Rameau’s Castor et Pollux, and the operas of
Monteverdi.
Sir Charles
Mackerras
on
Handel
EMI, LTD./CLIVE BARDA
EMI, LTD./CLIVE BARDA
Like a number of other contemporary conductors—Colin Davis, for
example, started as a clarinetist—Sir Charles Mackerras is an ex¬
woodwind player. Born in Schenectady, New York, in 1925, he was
taken by his family to Sydney, Australia, at the age of two, and, hav¬
ing studied at the Conservatorium there, became principal oboist of
the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Since 1947, apart from a year spent
in Prague studying with Vaclav Talich and a period with the Ham¬
burg State Opera, he has been based in England. Both there and
elsewhere, he has built up a reputation both as an exciting exponent
of the standard repertoire and as a notable scholar-performer in two
special fields —the music of the eighteenth century and the works of
Janacek. Thus his major contributions as musical director of the
English National (formerly Sadler’s Wells) Opera, a post he left at
the end of 1977, included both some remarkable Janacek productions
and what were probably the first modern presentations of the great
Mozart operas to be given with the kind of vocal ornamentation the
composer would have expected.
My conversation with Mackerras, taped early in his last
year at the English National, began in his office at the London Coli¬
seum and continued over lunch at an Italian restaurant just around
the corner. It was a convivial meeting. Mackerras talked with easy
authority, and with a common-sense directness that I found aptly
Handelian. He is at the opposite extreme from the mystics of the
podium: A supremely successful and practical conductor who knows
his scores as well as most and their background rather better. His
energy, too, is infectious, and seems happily free from the irascibility
often associated with oboists—something to do, they say, with all
that high wind pressure confined in the cranium.

IS
 T he difference between Handel and his contemporaries
seems to me to be his incredible gift for melody, within
the framework of a contrapuntal style. Other great
composers, such as Bach, also write beautiful melodies, but their real
talent lies more in the combinations of the Baroque style—the contra¬
puntal style — and in the way they put their instruments and their voices
together. Now although Handel was perfectly capable of writing an
eight-part fugue, and a very good one, there is no other composer of the
early eighteenth century who writes such superb, such long and beauti¬
fully drawn-out melodies, with such extreme variety, and in the case of
allegro melodies, with such power and such vitality. You can, if you’re
not very careful, play Handel just as generalized, ordinary contrapuntal
music, much in the way that Bernard Shaw criticized Beecham for play¬
ing Mozart as generalized eighteenth-century music. But as a conduc¬
tor, one tries to bring out what one feels to be the special quality of a
composer which distinguishes him from other composers, and in my
view, with Handel, it is those special qualities of melody—of vitality in
the melody—that make him different from the others.
I also try, of course, to bring out in Mozart something that
makes him different from other, almost equally great composers of the
eighteenth century, like Haydn. It’s a funny thing, actually, that very
good Mozart conductors are frequently not very good Haydn conduc¬
tors, and vice versa. You’ll find that many of the greatest conductors of
Haydn symphonies do not do quite such a good job when it comes to
Mozart. I can think of quite a number of examples: for instance, Bruno
Walter, who was a Mozart conductor and not particularly a Haydn
conductor. Toscanini was a great Haydn conductor and almost con¬
ducts Mozart badly—he plays it over-charmingly or over-hectically.
This is often the case with Handel and Bach. I personally con¬
sider myself a good Handel conductor, and yet I feel that I’ve got quite a
long way to go before I can equal that in my performances of Bach. I’m

77
 78
Conductors on Conducting

talking now about actual interpretation as a conductor. The mu-

sicological problems of what to do with Handel—how to realize
Handel’s music as written down, how to put it into actual practice — are
far greater than they are with Bach, because Bach wrote out a great deal
more of his wishes than Handel did. With Bach you have to observe cer¬
tain well-known conventions, such as the double-dotting convention by
which, in certain cases, dotted notes are extended beyond their written
length, and there can be a certain amount of argument about how the
written appoggiatura notes, the little grace notes, are sung. But the
number of problems about performance with Handel is absolutely stag¬
gering.

Is that because he was writing for professionals more than Bach?

That is certainly the case, yes. And it is also the case, I think, that Bach
cared more about how his music was performed. His concern was im¬
mediately put into practice. He wrote out the ornamentation because he
didn’t like to leave it to somebody else. Handel more or less had to leave
it to the singers, because he was writing so terribly fast that he wouldn’t
be able to write out every da capo. And I think Handel accepted the
conventions much more than Bach did. But that provides a terrible lot
of problems before you even start on the question of interpreting the
music as a conductor.
Let’s talk about the musicological problems first. They have,
as I say, nothing to do with interpretation in the sense of a conductor in¬
terpreting any music—a Beethoven symphony or a Mahler symphony
or whatever. Every conductor’s interpretation of every work will be his
own, will be different, if he’s any kind of a decent conductor. I’m not
talking now about that, although there is plenty of that in Handel after
you’ve done the musicological work.
The big trouble in Handel is that one doesn’t know how much
of what he wrote down is to be taken literally, or how much of the con¬
ventions of the day one is expected to follow. We know that there was a
practice called notes inegales—that, in French music particularly, the
music would be written as even eighth notes and was expected to be
played dotted. We even have experience of that in the twentieth century
in jazz. It is no longer the practice in jazz to do notes inegales unless
they’re written so, which is rather interesting in the way it reflects the
same development in the eighteenth century. It was the practice in the
great days of jazz—I mean the Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller eras —to
write everything as quavers and for it to be played slightly inegale.
 79
Sir Charles Mackerras on Handel

Now, with Handel you have the most terrible problem, that he writes
things dotted, and then he writes them even, and then he writes them
dotted again, and you don’t really know whether or not he means a
difference.

Or if he just got lazy at a certain point. Classic case: “The Trum¬

pet Shall Sound“ in Messiah —do you suddenly change the dotted
rhythm, or are you meant to assimilate everything to the dotted
form?
Yes, exactly. That is the classic case. But almost every work by Handel
has something similar to “The Trumpet Shall Sound,” and whatever the
solution you come to, you’re absolutely baffled how he could leave it in
such a peculiar state. So you’ve got to do something about that. Now,
many of the older conductors of the Romantic period, of the type that
used to do Messiah with additional accompaniments and all that sort of
thing—it didn’t seem to worry them that there were inconsistencies of
rhythm. And it is not absolutely certain that it even worried Handel,
nor is it absolutely certain that he did not want it to be played exactly as
it’s written. A very interesting thing is that, although the opening of
“The Trumpet Shall Sound” has, in various editions, different dotted
rhythms, for the rest of the aria all of the sources —editions and
manuscripts and so on —are absolutely unanimous. They all change in
the same places, and there is never a doubt that that’s how it’s written.
Another thing is the fact that, when Mozart did his arrange¬
ment of Messiah, in almost all cases—not all, but almost all—he took
the difference between the dotted and the undotted thing as gospel, and
when he arranged his own wind parts into it, he just took the difference
between the dots and the evens and conformed to it. For instance,
because the trumpet couldn’t play high enough any more for “The
Trumpet Shall Sound,” Mozart completely reorchestrated it as an ob¬
bligato for two horns and one trumpet, in which the trumpet part is ex¬
tremely simplified and the horns do all the complicated stuff. But never
once does Mozart—although he alters the orchestration so
much —never once does he think of altering the rhythm by even one
semiquaver. Of course, the performance practice of music had
developed in the interim. But they’re still sufficiently near to each other
in time so that Mozart’s orchestration can be taken as being an in¬
teresting comment, when a great composer simply takes all these funny
changes of rhythm and just writes them out. Also, Mozart even takes
the wrong notes in the edition that he used to make his arrangement and
 80
Conductors on Conducting

uses them as if they were right. You know how all Handel’s choruses
end with a plagal cadence. Well, at the end of “And the Glory of the
Lord,” in the edition that Mozart used—we know which one it was
— there is a wrong note in the viola, a G-sharp instead of an A. But
Mozart orchestrated it as if it was correct. Not only does he leave the
G-sharp in the viola, but he puts all the wind parts on that note, so that
the result is a very strange cadence indeed.
Then take the introduction to the Fireworks Music, parts of
which seem to want to be double-dotted and parts of which seem not to
want to be double-dotted in order to fit with other voices, and parts of
which again seem to require to be notes inegales in order to fit with
voices above, which are dotted. Handel did two versions of the
Fireworks Music himself and wrote two concerti grossi in different keys
based on the same material —they’re different works, but they’re based
on the same themes, and nearly all of the Fireworks Music occurs at one
point or another in these two concertos. And if you look at the various
versions of it, he always writes, from the point of view of dotting, exact¬
ly the same, which rather suggests that he intended that it shall be dot¬
ted when he writes it dotted and he intends that it shall not be when he
doesn’t. That’s very worrying.
I’ve been going on a lot about this question of changing of
rhythm, but there is no doubt that there is a lot that has to be put right,
that it has to be written down so that modern musicians can play it, and
play it properly.

You mean that as a conductor you have to put it in your parts?

Yes—that somebody, in my view, has to edit every work by Handel in
order for it to be properly done. Because there are never any expression
marks, and although it is pretty certain that the big choruses of Handel
were in fact sung all forte, it cannot be true that they were sung without
any variety of color. It’s possible that they improvised in Handel’s time,
and it is possible still today to improvise the expression of a big Handel
chorus.

When you say “all forte,” do you mean even a passage that’s
usually done softly like the end of “All We Like Sheep”?
Yes. Well, that’s not piano, and it’s not even always done piano today.
It used to be done piano in the big-forces type of performance. But I per¬
sonally always do that forte, even though I do it with a diminuendo at
 81
Sir Charles Mackerras on Handel

the end. But I would think that it’s very likely that it was done in
Handel’s period all forte, all sort of mezzo-forte.

Where do you get your diminuendo from?

I do it because I feel that it’s right. There is now, today, a trend in the
performance of old music which wants to perform it exactly as it was
done then. In other words, they use old instruments or copies thereof,
old pitch, and everything like that. Now in that case, when you do it
with instruments that are not capable of much crescendo or diminuen¬
do, you can make a much more authentic performance, a performance
much more like it would have been in the eighteenth century. With
those instruments and very small forces, the problems, of course,
become far smaller. With a Baroque oboe, a Baroque violin, et cetera,
and a small chorus singing often with boys on the top line, the range of
expression is so much smaller that you can understand why it doesn’t
make much difference even to a composer like Mozart whether a thing
is forte-piano, forte, or piano.

Is it for a deliberate, positive reason that you haven’t gone into

the authentic-instrument style of performance in Handel?
No, the reason is simply that, if you’re going to perform a work really
authentically in that respect, you would do without a conductor, be¬
cause they didn’t have conductors then. The other kind of interpreta¬
tion didn’t exist—the type of interpretation that a conductor now
imposes upon his orchestra, chorus, and soloists when he conducts the
Beethoven Ninth Symphony.

Would you say that the need for a conductor arose from the
greatly increased expressive resources of newer instruments, as
well as from the greater scale and complexity of the music itself ?
Oh, yes, there’s no question about that. Even when they had those
small forces doing complex works like the St. Matthew Passion, or a
Handel oratorio, they didn’t dream of having a conductor who inter¬
preted the work for them. They had a director who would play from the
organ or the harpsichord or the violin, and he was there just to keep it
together.

And to give the time at the start, which is presumably why so

many big Handel choruses like the “Hallelujah Chorus” begin
 82
Conductors on Conducting

with four bars of concertino instead of ripieno, because it isn’t till

you get to the ripieno that the man had started the thing going
sufficiently to sit down and start playing himself.
Precisely. And that’s also why so many choruses—and even pieces for
orchestra—begin with a bass note, because if the music in the upper
parts begins on the second half of the bar, like say the Fireworks, that
way you have a bass note for the organist to start it off. He was the di¬
rector. And in the later eighteenth century, with the two roles of Kon-
zertmeister and of Kapellmeister, they had two conductors as a way of
getting things right. When Haydn conducted his symphonies in Lon¬
don, Salomon was the first violin, Haydn was at the harpsichord or
whatever, and they conducted it together. Haydn would have specified
the things he wanted, but Salomon would have been equally responsible
for keeping the thing together.

And presumably, if one can extrapolate from the behavior of any

reasonable contemporary composer you care to name, Haydn
would very often have listened to Salomon, and said, “Yes, that’s
the best way to do it”.
Yes, exactly. Very often those spurious phrasings in Haydn certainly
stem from the very early performances. Often they are just ways of
making them practicable to be played on the violin, because they never
thought of writing out bowings in those days. A lot of the concepts that
we take for granted today, such as making the difference between a
crotchet and a quaver—a crotchet, and a quaver and a rest, or even a
minim—were never thought of by musicians until the end of the nine¬
teenth century. They’re strictly Wagnerian concepts. In the eighteenth
century, one time in a piece it will be written one way, the next time it
will be written the other. There are many cases in Mozart’s operas. No
difference is intended because that wouldn’t have occurred to a musi¬
cian of that time, even a Mozart, even the divine Mozart. He writes so
quickly, anyway, that of course he writes a crotchet in the upper part
and a minim in the lower part, but many people, and many conductors,
take that sort of thing terribly seriously. A huge great fetish is made out
of the Commendatore in the opening of the Don Giovanni overture,
where it’s a minim in the bass and a crotchet in the treble, and they say,
“Hold on!” to the cello and bass for hours after the violins have stopped,
because they think it’s the tread of the Commendatore’s statue ap¬
proaching and that sort of thing. Of course, that’s absolute nonsense.
 83
Sir Charles Mackerras on Handel

When Mozart rewrote this passage for his catalogue of works, he wrote
the bass as a crotchet—which shows how much he thought it was the
Commendatore of stone!
Apart from note values, when performing Handel one has to
remember how new are so many of the things that we take for granted.
Slurs, for example —the fact that it matters whether a slur is over three
notes or over four notes. It didn’t matter to Bach and Handel; they just
would have thought, you know, “I want it smooth.” But they don’t in¬
dicate exactly how many notes they want to be legato or staccato.
When it does matter to them, they take very good care to write exactly
over a staccato note, and that’s why it’s a good thing to be able to look
at the original manuscript—you can see whether he’s just dashing off a
slur, or whether he’s being really careful. An example of them being
really careful is of Bach, in the St. Matthew Passion, in the alto
recitative “Mein lieber Heiland, du,” where you can see in the original
manuscript that it is very, very carefully put for a few times with three
legato notes and the one staccato.
Well, all these are things that are necessary to do before the
performance or rehearsals start. Provided you’re doing it with modern
instruments, even if you’re using the forces approximately of the origi¬
nal performance, even if you’re using a chamber orchestra et cetera.
With modern scores and instruments it is still necessary—apart from
correcting the wrong notes—to indicate exactly what is long and what
is short, what is legato and what is staccato, what is loud and what is
soft. You can tell these differences very clearly with modern instru¬
ments, and modem singers are taught to be very clear about everything,
so you have to be more precise when you’re writing things down for
modem players—and you also need a conductor far more.
The reason I as a conductor am more interested in that kind of
performance is that, much as I admire performances with old instru¬
ments and ones which really try to recapture the original performance,
the conductor becomes absolutely redundant. I’m not very good at
playing anything—I used to be an oboe player. I can play the organ and
the harpsichord and the piano to a certain extent, but there are many
people who can play it so much better than I that, except for the occa¬
sional recitative in a Mozart opera, I don’t dare to play the harpsichord
in public. So genuine, authentic performances of old music don’t need
me. Even a work of the size of the Bach B Minor Mass, when Nikolaus
Harnoncourt does it with the Concentus Musicus- well, Hans Gilles-
 84
Conductors on Conducting

berger is the conductor of the chorus, and nobody else is conducting the
arias or anything at all, in the modern sense of conducting. Harnon¬
court is doing it himself, from the cello, I think.
The funny thing about old instruments is that there’s not only
less dynamic range, but less difference between staccato and legato. So
the fact that the composers very often didn’t indicate and didn’t know,
exactly, whether they wanted three notes slurred or four notes slurred
also stems partly from the instruments, and from the fact that they
didn’t need to know. Even those instrumentalists didn’t need to know.
They sort of played it by ear, and they thought, “Oh, he’s playing
slurred—maybe I’ll play slurred.” It was, as far as I can see, a free-for-all
in the phrasing. How do I know? Because very often a composer would
slur a passage once and not do it another time—sometimes even do it
only the second time, and you think, “Oh, yes, well, that’s supposed to
be slurred all along.”

You wouldn’t think that possibly he was just expecting his con¬
ductor to sort these things out, or keeping it in his head because
he was the conductor himself? After all, they did rehearse.
Yes, but very little. Rehearsals consisted of correcting the wrong notes
and getting it vaguely together—they couldn’t sit down and just sight-
read everything in those times. How do I know? Because it’s only very
recently—it’s only in this century, in the last few decades—that the
ability to sightread has become such a general thing. In fact, sightread¬
ing was considered one of those rather peculiar talents that only the
greatest musicians had. They would say, “Why, he played at sight a
whole Mass!” It is something that, well, every music student could do
today.
Even when I was a child in Australia (and let’s say that Austra¬
lian music-making was ten years, or fifteen years even, behind the Euro¬
pean standards when I was a child), you’d have to point out all kinds of
things that would seem obvious to a modern musician, such as that it
was not a tremolo but measured semiquavers. You had to explain
about syncopation to musicians; they wouldn’t automatically play it
perfectly. You now don’t have to teach them how to play, but until a
very few years ago you did have to teach them to play. You had to teach
them simple things. When Toscanini first came to England, you know,
they said, “Oh, he taught us how to read music.” Puccini said of
Toscanini, “He’s the only one who seems to be able to read music,
because he’s the only person who can read what I’ve put down and do it
properly.”
 85
Sir Charles Mackerras on Handel

This amounts to saying that there’s been a very radical, revolu¬

tionary change in the nature of orchestral music-making just
within the last generation, rather more radical than changes in
comparable periods of time since people started conducting.
I would say not just one generation, but rather more than one genera¬
tion. You recollect the kind of thing that had to be done in London at
the Proms —they had to play the Schoenberg Variations on one re¬
hearsal in which there was also a Brahms symphony and selections from
the Ring and that sort of thing. They very frequently never had a chance
to rehearse sufficiently to get any of these things right. Going further
back, Beethoven was constantly writing the difference between piano
and pianissimo. We take it for granted today that those differences will
be made. He had to fight to get those things, and as he was deaf, poor
man, also, he didn’t know whether they were doing it or not. Later on,
Verdi, in order to get what he wanted, had to write ppppp and fffff to
impress on the performer that he wanted a passage really soft or really
loud. There’s a much greater quickness on the part of the average or¬
chestral musician today than there was even fifty years ago. I’m quite
sure of that.

Does it vary in different countries in your experience?

Yes. They’re still back in the pre-war era in certain places in Europe —
Italy and Eastern Europe, for example. I have conducted orchestras
where they really need lots of rehearsal in order to get the basic things
right—the grammar. For instance, I’ve performed the Frank Bridge
Variations of Britten with orchestras in Eastern Europe. Now, that’s
difficult to play, but it’s not difficult to comprehend. Yet you have to do
a terrible lot of explaining. I remember doing the Britten Sea Interludes
in Moscow. Really, they had the greatest, greatest trouble. You know
the “Moonlight” piece, the prelude to the last act, with the triplets
against the other rhythm. They just couldn’t understand it at all. But
this is something where you’d just say “Watch” to an American or¬
chestra and they would immediately understand. It’s more rhythm than
seeing the difference between forte and piano that they fall down on
now. Even today, certain orchestras in the Latin countries too have to
be told about rhythms that you would never dream of insulting an
American or English orchestra by even mentioning.

I believe Stravinsky, around 1950, commented on the inability of

Russian orchestras simply to do the rhythms in The Rite of
Spring, written thirty-seven years before.
 86
Conductors on Conducting

Yes, they found it completely new. But eighteenth-century musicians, I

think, were used to playing things. They didn’t rehearse things very
much, but they didn’t have to be told about style, you see, because it
was all the same style. If they lived in France they played in the French
style, if they lived in Germany they played in the German style. But
what I think they did have to be told about was that note is twice as long
as the other note, that’s a minim, that one is a crotchet, be careful
— basic things like that.

On the one hand, the style, as you say, was understood by per¬
forming musicians —it was all the same style in a given country.
Then there is the matter of applying our modern knowledge of
eighteenth-century performance tradition to hastily-written, per¬
haps even abbreviated scores. How, as a conductor, do you jug¬
gle style and the music as written? This is the nub of the
problem.
Yes, it is. Well, I do it by using my instinct and my knowledge. Knowl¬
edge is dangerous. You have to use your instinct to some extent, be¬
cause you can go on reading the style textbooks of Carl Philipp
Emanuel Bach and Johann Joachim Quantz and all those writers—with
the lesser ones, you know, there are literally hundreds of books from
that period which can be read. Even though they describe how they do
it, you try to apply it, and whenever you do so you find that it doesn’t
quite work.

“Behold the Lamb of God” in Messiah: No matter how you ap¬

ply any rules that I’ve ever come across, you end up with anoma¬
lies.
Yes, you end up with anomalies, you end up with something odd. And
the funny thing is that I don’t think that they really thought very much
about it, those eighteenth-century musicians. They knew that you
changed rhythms sometimes and not other times. Also, they didn’t care
so much if it wasn’t together. You see, we will always think: “Well now,
because the viola is written as a semiquaver there and the voice is writ¬
ten as a quaver, we have to change one to make it come together.” Well,
very frequently it isn’t right for the voice necessarily to sing a note as
short as an instrument plays that same note because it mightn’t fit the
word.

There’s a case in the 3/4 section of the “Catalogue Aria” in Don

Giovanni.
 87
Sir Charles Mackerras on Handel

Yes. Obviously, the way Mozart intended that to be sung—knowing

that it would be sung from memory—is for it to be sung as near as pos¬
sible together with the melody, but you’ve got to breathe some time,
and therefore you have to sing it as a quaver sometimes; other times it
seems to me appropriate to sing it as a semiquaver. In other words, the
people who say that it must be changed because it must be together are
not quite right, but the people who say, “Ah, everything the Master
wrote has got to be done exactly literally because he wrote it that way,”
they’re also not right. You have to use your practical instinct over these
things. This is where the musicologist and the performing musician so
frequently come to blows, because the musicologist very often does not
consider the practical side, the fact that Leporello has to breathe there,
and he says, “Right, you sing it as a semiquaver.”

This general common sense position contrasts with the specific

argument in your article about appoggiaturas [“Sense About the
Appoggiatura/’ in the October 1963 issue 0/Opera]. You make
the point very strongly there that all the sources say, not merely
that you may perform appoggiaturas...
But that you must.

That is a very special case, then, where there is a rule that you
have to follow. But what you’re saying about eighteenth-century
notated rhythm is that you have to apply a lot of common sense
and practical performing sense.
But you also have to even with the appoggiaturas. There are some cases
where it is impossible to do an appoggiatura because of the way the har¬
mony goes or something like that, and very frequently, through apply¬
ing those rules about the appoggiatura too rigidly, you can also get into
a lot of trouble. And again, you see, most of the rules and examples
about appoggiaturas and ornamentation and all these things are taken
from composers whose work you don’t know. They’re never Mozart or
Haydn, they’re always Carl Heinrich Graun or Johann Adolph Hasse or
Domenico Cimarosa or someone, and each of these composers does
have a different flavor, a different tendency in these things. So it’s ter¬
ribly dangerous to apply one thing holus-bolus to another. On the other
hand, the opposite danger of thinking, because Mozart was a great
composer, a greater composer than all the others of his period, that you
have to respect his taste much more than the other composers’ —that is
also a pitfall, because it means that you’re often performing Mozart’s
music quite against the convention.
 88
Conductors on Conducting

It is amazing how much people read things into pieces. There’s

the Don Giovanni Commendatore passage you mentioned earlier.
And then there’s the staccato dot that comes into the main theme
of the last movement of the Haffner Symphony just on its last ap¬
pearance, when it’s been legato every time before. If you look at
the facsimile edition of Mozart’s original manuscript you see that
he didn’t even write that passage out. Like all the reappearances
of the rondo theme, it’s indicated merely with a da capo mark¬
ing, which means that any such variant is nonsense.
That’s another example of the great value of original and facsimile
scores. The original Handel manuscript is often very interesting. When
you see, for instance, how he leaves out a bar sometimes and slots it in
at the top of the page, things of that kind, you understand why a lot of
his things are not very clear. But also he wrote in a very big, bold hand;
he wrote in a hell of a hurry. Now Bach, although he had to write so
fast, never wrote flauto unisono with the oboe or anything; he wrote
out the flute part, and he wrote out the oboe part. And so, very often,
when there are inconsistencies of phrasing in Bach, that is because he
had to write them all out separately—he never thought of using the coll’
[“in unison with”] sign as shorthand.

Where, presumably, Handel’s practice of using the coll’ sign leads

to problems because you get notes that an instrument can’t play.
Yes, exactly. Well, you would just assume that you put them up an oc¬
tave or leave them out or something like that. Handel is certainly care¬
less about his orchestration, you know, about who is playing what. It’s
never very clear, because he frequently puts a treble and a bass clef for
an aria and doesn’t indicate whether it’s violins or basses or whatever.
You can often tell more from the parts what the practice was. For in¬
stance, if you want to find out what the bassoons should play in
Messiah, you look at Handel’s parts, because Handel didn’t write any
bassoon or oboe parts in the full score itself.

Well, bassoon was col basso, presumably.

Yes, but not all the time. The viola, when it did have a part, was some¬
times col basso and sometimes tacet, and you can tell that from the
parts—the parts that were not copied by Handel, or written by Handel,
but were used during Handel’s performances.

He didn’t ever do his own parts, did he?

 89
Sir Charles Mackerras on Handel

No. Bach often did. Of course, that’s another difficulty with the inter¬
pretation of Bach —he copied his own parts, sometimes copied them
differently from the score, and you wonder which is the correct one.

Is it a second thought, or is it an accident?

Very often, of course, it’s just making it clearer to the musician who’s
going to play it. There’s the famous example of the “Domine Deus” in
the B Minor Mass, of which the flute part is written Scotch-snapped in
the part, notes inegales, only just for the first few bars, and from then on
in even semiquavers the way it’s written in the score. The version in the
part shows the player that Bach thinks it would be good if the whole
thing was played inegale.

And you don’t get that kind of clue in Handel?

No. The question of the interpretation of Handel—I’m still speaking of
the musicological side, not interpreting by means of conducting—is
very difficult because there are almost no examples of actual contempo¬
rary realizations of any of his music. Almost all of the examples of or¬
namentation of the famous works of Handel were made considerably
later than the music was composed, and consequently one of the biggest
dangers when ornamenting is that you will be out of style, you will be
doing it out of the period, more in the manner of Mozart’s period. The
ornamentation which you put on top of Handel, particularly in
Messiah, is liable to be something similar in style to Mozart’s own ac¬
companiments which he put in. The trouble is that, although we know
so much about performance practice of Handel’s period, there still re¬
mains no clear rule of thumb to apply to his music.

Is this something that you regret, or, as a conductor, do you

regard it as rather a relief that there is still an area in which you
have to use instinct?
Well, it would be better if one could always apply the rule. There are
many people, of course, who’ve tried to apply rules too rigidly, I think.
They think, “Ah, here is a piece that is obviously dotted in theory, like
‘The Trumpet Shall Sound.’ It is known that in Handel’s time the
business of notes inegales was still in practice, it is known that this is a
martial type of number, it is known that often they played martial music
dotted although it is not written so. Therefore, let us dot everything.” It
would be convenient for a performer if that was really the case, but it
certainly is not. And in almost any place in Handel, when you think,
 90
Conductors on Conducting

fine, you’ve made a rule, you’ve found a rule that you can apply—you
find yourself in the wrong near the end of the piece. There’s hardly a
single piece of Handel where the rule can be applied absolutely hard and
fast. Now, this may be because Handel was an unusual composer, in
that he was an unusual personality, he had a more interesting personali¬
ty than many of the others —that’s why he wrote more interesting
music. And as with Beethoven and Janacek and Berlioz —lots of com¬
posers who make exceptions to their own rules all the time —why
shouldn’t Handel also be like that?...

Since they’re not even his own rules we’re talking about, they’re
the rules of a stylistic period.
Yes, precisely, so that it is impossible to make hard and fast rules. The
thing I think in performing Handel, or any Baroque music, is to drink in
the spirit of the period and its music, but then use your instinct. Having
got your knowledge of eighteenth-century music (which is like learning
to read, or learning to read music), then you have to use your instinct.

In a sense I applied a principle like this years ago when, in High

Fidelity, I was doing a comparative review of all Messiah record¬
ings that were available. I produced a monstrosity of a chart
analyzing one particular recitative, “Comfort Ye,” listing about
ten musicological points of the sort we’ve been discussing, and
scoring all the performances for the number that they did. I
pointed out in the introduction that, once people had reached
about six out of ten, when they’d demonstrated that they were
doing it in the spirit of the thing, then they could be allowed the
discretion of leaving out the others because that was the instinct
coming into play. Once the stylistic credential has been establish¬
ed, then, as a critic, you can say, “Fair enough, if they feel that
way about it, that’s the way they feel.”
Yes, you’re right. These questions all belong to the areas of editing, or¬
namentation, all that kind of thing, which should be decided by the
conductor before he even starts performances. Normally, if I don’t have
time to edit a work myself, I get someone to do it with the proviso that I
can change it. It’s always done with somebody whom I respect so much,
or who respects me, that we can exercise the right of constructive
disagreement.
After all that comes the question of conductors’ interpreta¬
tion, in the modern sense, in which a conductor’s Ausstrahlung—his
 91
Sir Charles Mackerras on Handel

emanation —makes a difference to the performer. Let’s take the Handel

choruses. A conductor who has no knowledge of eighteenth-century
style at all can make many Handel choruses sound absolutely splendid.
In fact, he can make them sound better than many a Baroque expert,
because they are so full of vitality and so full of interest and such im¬
mensely complicated ideas, although apparently simple. And that is, in
a way, the mark of a great composer, that the further you delve into his
music the more you see complications which often the composer didn’t
know about.

This is very close to what Beethoven said about Handel: “The

greatest effects with the simplest means. ”
Yes, that is so of Handel. Of course, Beethoven is himself another ex¬
ample of that. A whole lot of C Major chords being crashed around,
you know, are very often the thing that produces the greatest, the most
emotional effect in Beethoven. You’ve only got to look at the finale of
Fidelio to see that.

Pure vibration.
Exactly. Now assuming that the editing has been done, and you’ve got a
modern orchestra and a modern choir, then your conducting inter¬
pretation of Handel is just the same as with whatever you’re conduct¬
ing. If you hear Karajan conducting the opening of the St. Matthew Pas¬
sion, it’s all very, very smooth, and it’s very, very beautiful, and it does
start from fairly soft and it does build to a huge fortissimo, and he has
the architecture of that great chorus right there in his head and he does
it. But it is not in any sense a Baroque effect, or an effect which has
anything to do with what Bach could have imagined. But wherever you
stand on those issues, it seems to me that the conducting of Handel,
once the editing is done, is the same as conducting any other composer.
You feel the style, you get excited by the music, and you try and excite
the performers into feeling the same way as you do about the music.

Yes. But relating your view of yourself as a Handel conductor

and perhaps as less of a Bach conductor with what you said at
the beginning about the specific melodic quality of Handel, can
one draw any kind of line to your affinity with a composer like
Janacek — with whom melodic gift and vitality are certainly two
of the first words that would come to one’s mind, in the same
way that they would with Handel?
 92
Conductors on Conducting

I think that’s true, and that’s another thing that makes me a good Verdi
conductor. Without wishing to analyze myself too much, I think that
it’s possible that my conductor’s gifts do lie in making melody sound
beautiful and in making orchestral color sound interesting and in clarity
of parts. Now, in a Handel chorus, whether it be sung all forte from
beginning to end or not, it’s still necessary to balance those parts so that
you can hear all of the important parts all of the time. That’s very often
not the case in performances of Handel choruses. But I find that I can
achieve very good balance with Handel choruses simply by Aus-
strahlung— that is, by emanating my desire to hear the right melody, the
right motif coming through. That saves you having to stop the or¬
chestra and the chorus and say, “Please sing that louder and please do
that softer.”

Is it a question of the way you look at that particular group in

the orchestra?
Yes, it is partly that, and partly a question of them in the first place feel¬
ing what the conductor is trying to do. After all, the essence of conduc¬
ting altogether is making the musicians feel what the conductor wants
in the quickest possible time, so that lots of different musicians are made
to feel as one—in spite of themselves sometimes, even if they don’t agree
with you basically, even if the leader or concertmaster of the orchestra
thinks, “Oh, well, I would have done that this way myself, but I can see
that the other way is a tenable theory.” Provided that the conductor can
persuade the musicians of the truth of doing the interpretation in a cer¬
tain way — all the musicians together, all of them—and make them, as it
were, work as one, work all together for the achievement of the aim of
doing it that way, that is the successful conductor. If his way also hap¬
pens to be good, or something which people will accept, which critics
will accept, which the audience likes also, then he’s still more successful,
he’s a great conductor.

But, of course, you can be a successful conductor without being a

good musician. Arising, though, out of this whole thing about
Handel’s melodic vigor and your natural affinity for that sort of
musical expression. I’m trying to pin down something very spe¬
cific about how you actually go onstage and conduct Handel, as
opposed to all the preparation we’ve been talking about. This
may be oversimplifying it, but would your isolation of that par¬
ticular factor as the great Handel quality mean that, in Handel,
 93
Sir Charles Mackerras on Handel

you would tend to bring one part into relief, whereas in Bach
you might try to produce a more evenly balanced contrapuntal
texture?
No. I think I would achieve equal clarity in whichever composer it was.
It is the spirit of the music, the forward movement, the feeling of the line
which I think that I understand better in Handel than I do in Bach.

The quality that I feel, too, about Handel. Listen to any Handel
opera, even the nineteenth-best of them, and you have a sense of
whoomph, o/slancio — dash and abandon.
Yes, they’re so gutsy, they have that elan, they definitely do all have
that, whereas most of Bach’s most beautiful melodies are contemplative
melodies, aren’t they? You very rarely find Bach writing a very long
allegro melody.

One of the very few examples I can think of offhand is that

marvelous alto aria, “Saget mir geschwinde,” in the Easter
Oratorio, which is un-Bachian in a way—it has that kind of
gusto.
Yes, it’s very rare in Bach. Bach has lots of gusto in other ways—the
contrapuntal interweaving at the beginning of the “Gloria” in the B
Minor Mass, that kind of thing. But when he writes a long and beautiful
melody, like the air in the Suite in D, or “Sheep May Safely Graze,” or
the “Christe eleison” in the B Minor Mass—they are almost all slow
melodies. Handel was not only marvelous at writing slow melo¬
dies—these slow eight-in-a-bar largo melodies are, almost all of them,
simply inspired, of which “He Was Despised” perhaps is the most
familiar example —but it’s in the allegro, coloratura arias that he shows
such fantastic variety.

You are saying that there’s nothing really very specific that—
once you’re actually on the podium and you’ve got your material
prepared—you would at that stage be wanting to get in Handel
that you wouldn’t want to be getting in other music you were
conducting?
No, that’s not quite what I’m saying. I’m saying that in Handel’s own
time a conductor was not required, for various reasons. But what I’m
also saying is that when I stand up there to conduct a Handel oratorio, I
treat it the same as if I was conducting something else. That is, I
emanate staccato, or legato, or loud or soft or whatever in the same way
 94
Conductors on Conducting

as I do for any other composer. But what makes me perhaps a good

Handel conductor is that I have the feeling for the right tempo. It may
be that I have a more unerring feeling for the right tempo in Handel than
I do in Bach.

Reviewing the Simon Preston recording of Israel in Egypt recent¬

ly, and comparing it with your recording, I found it very hard to
choose between the two. But in the end I said I would pick the
Mackerras recording because it thrills me more—quite apart
from all the detailed questions we’ve been discussing, some of
which he does interestingly, some of which you do interestingly.
In the end Pm more excited by your performance than I am by
his.
Yes, but it’s the thing that gives the excitement that is the mysterious
thing. The thing that gives the excitement with music of that sort—
wherein does it lie? The loud parts are loud when he’s conducting it and
when I’m conducting it. It must be something to do with pulse and tempo.

And pulse is more important than tempo.

Yes, but both are very important. The tempo is the most important
thing for a conductor. Wagner realized that all those years ago. And
the ability to conduct one composer more than another does come
from this unerring sense of tempo in one case and a faltering sense in
the other, and I’m sure that’s the case with all composers and their
interpreters. The conductor only has that at his disposal, because a
competent conductor, the same as a competent player upon any in¬
strument, takes it for granted that he can conduct anything in time and
keep it together and know what are the melodies in the orchestra and
keep down the accompaniment —that is the same as being able to play
your basic stuff on an instrument.

That’s true to a certain extent. And yet, I don’t know whether

you’ll agree with me, but I feel the reason why certain people
like, say, Furtwangler and Giulini are great Brahms conductors
in the way that I don’t feel that Klemperer is a great Brahms
.conductor is partly that they have a different sense of the
balance of lines. Klemperer is much more a horizontal conduc¬
tor, whereas they give much more weight to the interplay of
line.
Yes, that’s true. But that’s not done by telling the musicians —it’s feel¬
ing the emanation, and it is a mysterious thing.
 95
Sir Charles Mackerras on Handel

Have you any idea how you do it?

No, no. All I know is that when I’ve conducted works like Traviata or
Figaro so many times, by simply thinking I can produce an entirely
different performance.

On the podium in concert?

Yes. And that’s what conducting in the German opera houses is all
about—you never get the same orchestra, you never get any rehearsal,
and you never get the same singers twice. So, doing a performance in a
German opera house is the final analysis of whether you can strahl aus,
whether you can emanate, how you can get all those players to do the
interpretations you have in your head. And that is conducting. Because
training an orchestra, this is a good and necessary thing, but it’s becom¬
ing less and less necessary. I reckon that a good conductor can achieve
almost anything by his emanation, provided the orchestra he works
with is sensitive.

In connection with this question of training orchestras, is it a

problem in Handel, as you conduct around the world, to make
them unlearn nineteenth-century playing habits, such as using the
frog of the bow?
Very, very much so. You have to use vibrato also if you’re playing
Handel on modern instruments —you still use vibrato in a long and
beautiful tune—but it’s a different kind of thing. Just as you do not play
“He Shall Feed His Flock” like the Patbetique Symphony, even though
you play it soft and beautiful and smooth. With orchestras that are not
used to it, I have a terrible job trying to persuade them to play with short
phrases rather than long ones, to articulate, to finish phrases off and
begin new ones rather than run them all in together, particularly when
the melody has a legato character.

Aren’t Carl Flesch and his school responsible for all this in a
way? Because most string players have learned at one or two or
three removes from the school which says that every line has to
be merged generally into the next line —the whole German-
Russian tradition of string playing and education?
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, yes, that’s true. But
the trouble is that, of course, Handel’s melodies also sound very good
when played that way. Handel’s “Largo” from Xerxes, you don’t really
have to go further than that. But I was thinking that a real exam¬
ple is the “Air on the G String,” in that, when you play the original Bach,
 96
Conductors on Conducting

you play it legato, you play it smoothly, you play it with rise and fall in
the melody, you play it with all the expression that you know about.
When you play Wilhelmj’s version on the G string, you also do that.
Now, what is the difference in your interpretation between one and the
other, apart from the sound of the G string? You can play the G-string
version an octave higher, on another string, and still make it sound like
Wilhelmj. The difference is the finishing of the phrases, the rounding off
of phrases and the beginning of new ones. You do it that way in the
original, whereas the G-string version likes to make it so that you never
breathe.

You’re always in the state of becoming.

Becoming a new phrase. The end of your phrase grows into the begin¬
ning of the next one—Carl Flesch, as you say.

It may be a pompous way of putting it, but where I’ve found per¬
formances of eighteenth-century music particularly at fault, it’s
often in the sense that they do sound as if they’re always be¬
coming, in the nineteenth-century manner, rather than being—a
constant sense of waiting breathlessly for the next bit.
And to a composer like Wagner, that principle of becoming was, as it
were, second nature, because to him music was something evolving out
of something else always, and that was what you did with music. That’s
what he did with his invention of Leitmotivs, you know, whether he
called them Leitmotivs in the Ring or they were just the motives that
were developed as in Liszt’s symphonic poems or as Wagner used them
long before he ever called them Leitmotivs. This takes from the
development section of the sonata form the idea that something
develops out of something else, it develops and becomes something
different and then that becomes something different again and becomes
something different still. And that was, to Wagner, axiomatic. And I’m
sure he thought that was axiomatic in all music.
Handel can, as I say, sound very good played that way, but it’s
not the way music was conceived in his period, and the difference is
what we mean by style.
 97
Sir Charles Mackerras on Handel

Mackerras’s editorial and interpretative ideas about Handel are not rep¬
resented on disc as copiously as they should be, but those recordings he
has made are brilliantly characteristic of his method. His two versions
of Messiah — in English on Angel/EMI, and in German, using the
Mozart edition discussed in our chapter, on Archive—have in common
an imaginatively scholarly approach and an abundance of the melodic
zest he regards as quintessential^ Handelian. His Archive recordings of
Israel in Egypt and Judas Maccabaeus are equally convincing proofs of
the compatability of music and musicology. They match rival versions
in stylistic judgment, and usually outdo them in sheer excitement. A
1977 disc, on Angel/EMI, of the Fireworks Music and the cognate or¬
chestral concertos further embodies the problems and solutions we
discussed. The version of the Water Music that followed it a year later
on the same label, though hardly less exciting, might be said to offer a
particularly clear illustration of one of the problems: recorded in
Prague, it has not quite succeeded in eradicating from the orchestral
playing certain habits o/vibrato that, at least to ears farther west, sound
inappropriate.
Colin
Davis
on
Berlioz
MIKE EVANS PHONOGRAM INTERNATIONAL B.V./MIKE EVANS
PHONOGRAM INTERNATIONAL B.V./MIKE EVANS
.
 My conversation with Colin Davis was spread over two days. The
first session was short. Davis’s initial enthusiasm for my proposal to
talk about Berlioz had been succeeded by a concern that it might be
“presumptuous” of him to express his views for something as rela¬
tively permanent as a book. But we had had other productive
meetings over a period of fifteen years, and Davis’s present eminence
has not lessened his reluctance to be disobliging, and so the message
that came back to me was, “'Well, I’m free just before lunch next
Friday—let him come in and chat for half an hour and we’ll see.”
My only previous visit to the Music Director’s office at the
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, had been exactly nine years
earlier, to talk with Georg Solti. At that time, Davis, born in
Weybridge in southern England in 1927 and a former clarinetist who
was essentially self-taught as a conductor, was Principal Conductor
of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, after holding posts with the BBC
Scottish Orchestra and the Sadler’s Wells Opera. He succeeded Solti
at Covent Garden in 1971. It was amusing to feel the difference in the
atmosphere the two men brought to their work — crackling with ner¬
vous energy in Solti’s case, and now, with Davis, genially relaxed,
and modestly free of any “star conductor” consciousness. We taped
what turned out to be the first part of this chapter, and then Davis
said: “Now that I know the sort of thing you want, why don’t you
come back next Wednesday and we can have more time?”

103
 T he question, “Is there a Berlioz sound?”, is a big one,
all connected with ways of playing music. There is,
shall we call it, an Italian style which we associate with
Donizetti, and Verdi particularly. It’s the nineteenth-century Italian
style, in which the notes are much shorter than the notes associated
with the German nineteenth-century style. Take the two chords at the
beginning of the Eroica Symphony, which are quarter notes and have
staccato dots on them. Now, if that were Verdi, you’d play a note like
that very short, as in Falstaff, very short notes, without much bow. In a
Beethoven symphony, that note means that you use, as far as I’m con¬
cerned, the whole bow, so that you get a different sound, fuller and
longer. As Furtwangler used to say about Toscanini, it’s not like pulling
champagne corks — it’s like getting hold of a tree and pulling it up by the
roots. I don’t know whether he said the second bit, but that’s my image
for it.
Basically, there are those two styles, and if you’re playing
Brahms or Beethoven or Schubert it’s the one, and if you’re playing
Rossini or Verdi or Donizetti it’s the other. The French don’t have a
style in that sense, and when you come to Berlioz you have to decide
whether you’re going to treat him as basically a classical German com¬
poser, or something on his own, or a Mediterranean composer, so to
speak, on the other side of the Alps, transalpine.
We were talking before about the lengths of notes. This has
become something which I hope is not an academic obsession on my
part, but something which is so dreadfully important to the way music
sounds. A note before a rest is longer, because it has in its trajectory to
overcome the obstacle of a rest. Take those opening chords of the
Eroica Symphony: If you play them too short, you’re going to have two
beats’ silence instead of two bridges which are going to see you into the
Allegro. They’re just going to be two isolated pillars not supporting
anything at all, if they’re too short. And so, again, you go into Mozart
where the lengths of the notes become more and more important, or

105
 106
Conductors on Conducting

Haydn. In the Oxford Symphony, the minuet, if you play the last note
very short you haven’t completed your movement. A little more stress
on the final chord and you feel that, even for the end of the minuet, it’s
taken off into the ether somewhere, and it’s still alive. Cut it off too
sharply, and you’ve closed the lid on a coffin.
My attitude, as it is to most composers, to Berlioz is to ask
who were his heroes. And Berlioz’s heroes were Gluck and Weber, and
Mozart to a certain extent. Berlioz is a classical composer from the Ger¬
man tradition. When he’s writing the Fantastic Symphony, what he’s
really basically doing is writing a Beethoven symphony; he’s writing a
Classical symphony in his own way. He’s not writing a symphonic
poem, or a kind of crazy explosion, and therefore you play the Fantastic
Symphony as you would play a Beethoven symphony, with the same
feeling for pulse, for architecture, for rhythm that you would apply to
the Seventh Symphony of Beethoven. You don’t attempt, in the “March
to the Scaffold,” to change the tempo, or to try to whip the audience up
into a frenzy by going faster and faster. You observe very carefully the
instructions that he has put into the score, because, after all, Berlioz
conducted that piece a very great deal, and on his score are scribbled all
kinds of instructions. The same goes for the “Witches’ Sabbath” and
Harold in Italy.
Now, if you approach it in that way, then what you get is a
piece of obviously classical music, which I think — this is again very sub¬
jective—is truer to the spirit in which he himself composed those pieces,
because it’s all homage to his heroes. Look at something like The Tro¬
jans, which is so antique in its forms, as opposed to something like
Tristan, which is a completely novel way of attempting to write an
opera. That really covers my attitude to Berlioz in general. He’s a
classical composer. But with all the cleanness and solidity of the sound,
at the same time, he doesn’t, of course, sound like Beethoven, because
he... because he isn’t Beethoven.

When I listen to your Berlioz performances. I’m acutely aware of

a unique quality in the line and texture, a sort of ventilation in
the sound. What do you ascribe this to?
This is because Berlioz is writing—how shall I say—he was not a com¬
poser for the keyboard. The traditions of harmony that have grown up
from the very beginnings of music, wherever you want to begin, from
Josquin through to Schiitz and Bach and so on —this was something
that he knew about. He knew Palestrina. He knew all about what went
 107
Colin Davis on Berlioz

on in the Catholic Church because he’d attended it as a boy. But he was

also irritated with the formula, the Germanic formula of the statement
and answer and the half-close, and he was particularly irritated with the
squareness of the four-bar period. His passion was for the poetic
melody, such as he found in Gluck. The nearest thing to Berlioz is found
in Gluck’s Orfeo, for example—those endless arcs of melody which to
me are absolutely ravishing. You find them a little bit in Weber, but you
don’t really come up against anyone who’s equal to Berlioz till you get to
Bruckner, I think. The opening of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony is real¬
ly Berliozian. Of course there’s a different kind of texture behind it,
because behind Bruckner is the overture to Freischiitz and the horns and
everything. But they’re in that approach to melody in which each phrase
grows out of the one before, is unpredictable, and yet you are led to a
cadence, and you really feel that you’ve been on a journey which has
been worthwhile. As opposed to the Wagnerian approach, which is
that you go through certain harmonic procedures, and the melody is in
fact harmonic melody. It merely takes notes belonging to those chords,
and spins a kind of rather short-winded melody. A good example of all
this is the Liebestod. This is not to knock Wagner; it’s a different way of
writing music.
And so you’ve got to have, in dealing with Berlioz, a sense of
the voice, because any melody must be built into the vocal mechanism.
If you take, for instance, the introduction to the ball scene in Romeo
and Juliet, that is a great singing melody, the enormous violin tune that
goes on forever. You’ve got to support that as you would a great
operatic melody by Verdi, although it is of course constructed in quite a
different way.
Does Berlioz know how to write for the voice? He certainly
does! He writes things for the voice which are so grateful—although
tenors don’t seem to exist much now who can sing in the regions in
which he obviously expected them to, except for Nicolai Gedda and
one or two others. But if you can sing, these melodies sit on the voice in
a way which is, I think, probably more grateful than a lot of Italian
vocal music. So there is the voice behind all this.

Is there a sense of putting in the breathing when you’re doing one

of these long violin melodies —a pause or rest is not a rest but a
breath?
Oh, yes, but that also applies to Mozart, who wrote all his music with
reference to the voice. I mean all the melodies, all the arias in the piano
 108
Conductors on Conducting

concertos are operatic arias. And as we’re always saying to musicians, a

rest is not a hole, it is an articulation. Very often it is not measurable ex¬
actly metronomically or with a stopwatch how long that pause is. It is
just something which bridges one clause of music to another. What
you’ve said is something which is so basic to my attitude to written
melody that I’m glad you said it.
The harmonic element in Berlioz, which people have com¬
plained so bitterly about, is something which belongs so completely to
these melodies that, try to change any of these harmonies and, of
course, it’s nonsense, you can’t. So it’s no use saying Berlioz’s harmony
is bad if you can’t change it. It is actually built into the melodic vagaries
that he employs, and it is up to us to make the melody move and sing in
such a way that the supporting harmonies do actually sound as though
they are meant to be there, which they are. This is a matter of timing, of
course. After all, the whole business of music is trying to persuade
everyone who’s listening that they are where they should be at any given
moment. Then, of course, there’s the question of texture and this
miraculous ear that he had for sounds, and his scoring—that has all
become something that has been exploited by other composers,
however rude they’ve been about him. And also the rhythmical devices.
If you look at the “Queen Mab Scherzo,” there are actually in one place
four or five different rhythms going on at once, with bass drum and piz¬
zicato and horns—analyze it and you’ll find several strata of rhythm go¬
ing on, which again is something that has been taken up by a lot of other
composers.

Experience of performances that ignore the instruction animez in

the Fantastic Symphony prompts me to ask whether you find, any
anomalies in Berlioz’s use of directions that would justify ignor¬
ing them. Are there any oddities like Sibelius’s use of andante?
That’s non troppo andante, meaning “not too slow,” the same use, I
think, that Tchaikovsky made of that word—which is not what Mozart
and Beethoven meant by it, because andante also denotes a section, a
movement. But no, animez means animez. Berlioz is not going to use his
own language in a back-to-front way. It isn’t that these markings in
Sibelius and Tchaikovsky are really a misuse of language, because by
the time they got to these words they were a kind of tempo indication
meaning “slow” rather than “moving along.”
There aren’t linguistic problems in dealing with Berlioz, at
least when you’re dealing with French. But there is a difference between
 109
Colin Davis on Berlioz

rallentando and ritenuto', and you’ll find in the introduction to the Fan¬
tastic Symphony very precise instructions about what is supposed to
happen, which have been slightly changed, because rit. can mean
ritenuto or ritardando. Ritenuto may mean the holding back of a sec¬
tion— quasi ritenente in Brahms’s Second Symphony means that the
whole section is just a little pesante, I take it, a bit more rhetorical
— whereas rallentando means actually to get slower.
Some problems arise from the translation of the terms into
Italian—like animez to animato—which is what Weingartner and
Malherbe did instead of leaving them in the original French. But since
Berlioz does at certain points write animez, and he is obviously accelera¬
ting his tempo because he wants an exciting finish, I think we are wrong
to assume that he might have wanted that when he doesn’t write it in.
Take the Hungarian March: It has only one tempo indication, allegro
marcato, and that’s it, and the things that you hear done to that are
bizarre! Because, of course, he might have written molto animato,
animez, or whatever, but he didn’t. And the implication is that it’s a real
march from the very beginning to the end, with just a little recognition
of the final cadence. He’s pretty exact and specific, and when he wants
an effect he says so. This is quite the opposite of Wagner, who is most
inexact. Sometimes he writes immer bewegter [“still faster”], when in
fact what’s happened is that it was bewegter about twenty bars before
and he’s just realized it. He’s whipped the speed up, and he’s suddenly
thought, “My God, of course, it’s going faster!” All kinds of loose ends.
Again, he suggests suddenly im Zeitmass [“in tempo”], and there’s no
indication that anything has happened before. You can only assume
that he’s suddenly realized that at this point you must have a pulse of
some kind, because the music is so fluid. But because Berlioz is a
classical composer, one tends to regard his pretty sparse tempo indica¬
tions as the real thing.
There’s another negative direction in Berlioz, which is senza
accelerando — “don’t budge!” —knowing that there might be a tempta¬
tion at this point. If you remember how Wagner boasts of his wonderful
accelerandos at the end of movements which brought the house down,
maybe there was a nineteenth-century tendency introduced by the
Master of Saxony.

Along with the Mendelssohnian tendency toward faster tempos

anyway.
Yes. What we know of Berlioz as a conductor is that he was very severe,
 110
Conductors on Conducting

extremely precise. Take some of his instructions: In “Nature immense”

the great tenor piece in The Damnation of Faust, he says to the conduc¬
tor, “You must beat the nine eighth-notes of the measure in order to be
sure that it doesn’t hurry.” That, at first sight, seems an extraordinarily
academic thing to do. But he’s right. It’s 9/8, extremely slow, and he
says, “beat the nine eighth-notes,” although nothing is happening ex¬
cept changes of harmony. At the beginning, very weird harmonies, on
the principal beats of the 9 / 8 — that is three harmonies to a bar, or two.
But he says, “still beat out the nine eighth-notes.”

And you’ve found from experience. . .

... That he’s right.

Have you tried to do it the other way?

Oh, yes.

And what happened?

Blancmange.

And, presumably, also the fact that he says it suggests that it is

absolutely a departure from the norm.
Yes. Naturally, you would beat three, but you don’t because you fillet
it, it has no backbone.

Is there any problem in restoring cuts like the one in the Requiem
where the French traditionally leave out two measures at the end
of one of the movements?
I’m glad I’ve never heard of that.

When I was doing a Berlioz discography some years ago, before

your recording came out, all the recordings had that cut.
How very odd! There are inadvertent cuts in recordings, you know.
There are about four bars left out at the end olElektra on Georg Solti’s
recording—I’m sure it’s a tape affair.

That happens on tape, yes, absolutely. It happens in Steinberg’s

recording of The Planets, too, and in Bernstein’s Eroica. But, no,
I got into hot water over this one, because I made a fuss about it,
and then people wrote and told me how stupid I was not to
know that this was the French tradition: How could I accuse
 Ill
Colin Davis on Berlioz

Charles Munch of infidelity when it was the French tradition?

Well, I’m terribly sorry to say that my unawareness of this tradition is
complete.

Have you in fact conducted the Requiem in France?

Yes, in Les Invalides in Paris.

I guess somebody corrected the parts.

Well, what was in the score, we played—unless the score had been
tampered with, and there are two measures of the Requiem missing
where I didn’t look!

You haven’t any problems about cuts, then?

No problems about cuts, except of course in The Trojans, where we
don’t play all the ballets. We did once, on the occasion of a sort of
centenary thing; we played every note of that score. But I don’t think it’s
something one would normally do. As ballet music, you know, is left
out of Otello and Idomeneo and so on. I’d keep some of it, but not do
the whole. There are one or two cuts in The Trojans that really work
very well, as there are some that work very well in Tristan. As Richard
Strauss said, “A good opera is known by its cuts.” He always wrote too
much music, rather like a man who writes for the newspapers, knowing
that a lot of it would have to go. Strauss was wonderfully practical, pro¬
fessional about these cuts.
As for other changes, the only textural alteration I’ve ever
made in Berlioz is in the opening of Romeo and Juliet, at the recitative,
where the horns are all in different keys, and they therefore only play
scraps of the trombone recitative, and it sounds very odd. They them¬
selves don’t feel they belong to the melody. So the last time I did it I
wrote it all out for all the horns, which gives a marvelously solid sound
and seems to me to remove an anomaly.

That’s slightly analogous to the trumpets in the last movement of

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, isn’t it?
Yes, except... I disagree entirely, because I think that the bizarre
trumpet sound is part of that feeling of chaos which overtakes the whole
band there. And I don’t like rewriting the flute parts in order to play the
high As in Beethoven. It’s not the same sound. It doesn’t belong to his
orchestra.
 112
Conductors on Conducting

What do you do at that famous one, the transition to the second

subject in the first movement recapitulation of Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony?
Oh, the bassoons play it.

The bassoons and no horns?

Yes, bassoons play that. But that’s perfect, there’s nothing else playing,
you can hear it; it’s perfectly reasonable in color in any case. Or what
about that peculiar drop of the octave in the counter-melody of the
Seventh Symphony—the first fortissimo statement in the Allegretto,
and in the middle of it they come down. Norman del Mar collected an
enormous list of these things in Orchestral Variations: Confusion and
Error (London: Eulenburg Books). The beginning of Romeo, though,
is the only one of Berlioz’s compositions where I’ve actually rewritten
any of the parts.

On the question of tempo again, what do you feel about the

value of Berlioz’s metronome markings?
A metronome mark is an indication of the way the fellow thought about
it, maybe sitting in an armchair, maybe sitting at the piano, or maybe
from experience of performing in Berlioz’s case. And it’s very interesting
to discover that for the most part you agree, and then there are one or
two which don’t seem to quite work out. If you look at the first song of
Nuits d’ete (“Villanelle”), the quarter-note is 96 and it’s very slow.
Nobody’s ever done it like that. It doesn’t sound very good. On the
other hand, 132 sounds equally stupid. And so then you take Dante’s
first statement of the dark mood of your own imagination, and dredge
up what you can about your own freedom.

In a case like that, could it be that an exceptionally slow metro¬

nome marking is a warning sign, a defense against the fact that it
would be very easy to go too fast and, as you say, sound equally
silly?
Maybe. There was a lovely occasion when Stravinsky came to Oedipus
Rex at Sadler’s Wells, and he spoke to me afterwards, and he said he
found Jocasta’s aria rather slow, and I said, “Mr. Stravinsky, I tried to
follow the metronome mark.” He said, “My dear boy, the metronome
mark’s only a beginning!” And this is a really profound remark, because
a composer writes a piece of music, but, as music has no precise mean¬
ing, at any given moment it may mean anything to anybody. Therefore,
 113
Colin Davis on Berlioz

the means that anybody would use to express what his subjective feeling
was about that piece would involve all kinds of variations of tempo
— thank God!

It’s very good to hear that coming from Stravinsky. . .

Exactly!

.. . who of course argued. ..

He claimed...

. . . there was no such thing as feeling in music.

That’s right! And who grumbled, carped (he was like a lot of compos¬
ers), made a lot of rather stupid and bitter remarks about all kinds of
good musicians and composers. Having plundered them and all their
goods, all the things that were useful to him, he would then be rude
about them. But we don’t want to hear about that. We don’t know.
People make up stories about Stravinsky, and we don’t know whether
any of them are really true.

His point about the metronome is interesting. I heard him con¬

duct the Symphony of Psalms in New York very near the end of
his life and that endless bit at the end was approximately forty
percent below the metronome marking. It went on and on
forever. . .
The big bells.

. .. and I thought it would never come down. It was superb, ab¬

solutely marvelous! But a perfect illustration of the metronome
marking being only a beginning. Would you agree with me that
the relative values of metronome markings are important, show¬
ing what’s faster than what else? I can’t think of any Berlioz
examples, but the one that for me is crucial is the last two move¬
ments of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Maybe the metronome
markings for the whole piece are too fast, or too slow, or
whatever. But they very clearly show that Beethoven thought of
that enormous beginning of the last movement, with trombones
coming in for the first time in the symphonic literature, as a
broadening out rather than a speeding up, after the tremendous
tension of the transition.
Yes; but I can’t feel the Scherzo nearly as fast as that.
 114
Conductors on Conducting

No, but would you then reverse the tempo of the two move¬
ments—the tempo relationship? It seems to me, when you get to
those first two measures of the finale, with sustained half notes in
the brass, there has got to be a broadening out, like an enormous
river that’s come through a hole in the mountains.
To me what it feels like is that there are now four quarter notes to the
measure, not three, and so that is why it sounds broader. But take the
actual value of the quarter note, it’s not so different—it’s pretty nearly
the same, which is not at all what he’s written down, I quite agree. But if
you take the Scherzo at a spanking pace it sounds a bit grotesque. You
get the illusion of it being broader in the finale because there’s another
note in the measure. That may sound specious, and I’d like to check it
up, but I think that’s more or less what happens.

I take your point on that. It’s fascinating what happens with that
movement. I heard Monteux do it when he was too old any
more to beat four in a measure in the last movement. Conse¬
quently, he beat two, and it was much too fast, because it carried
him away.
Yes, it is a little broader, it must be broader, certainly.

At least for a couple of measures, if nothing else.

But if it goes too slowly it can be very ponderous, and rather bombastic,
and the extase, the exhilaration, at that moment tends to evaporate.

Coming back to Berlioz, do you want to say anything about cor¬

nets?
Yes. I like cornets.

Are you bothered when you can’t have them?

No, I’m not. But I prefer them, of course. It’s a different color.

I mean, in the ordinary orchestral context, and in the context of

something like the solo cornet part in the Fantastic.
Oh, yes, there should be a cornet there—I can’t bear not to have it.

It’s funny that the piece was done for years and years without.
Yes. Well, there again, these are a composer’s second thoughts, and it
became later on an enormous point with Mahler and Bruckner, didn’t
it? I mean, the number of versions of these symphonies which exist are
 115
Colin Davis on Berlioz

alarming. In Mahler’s case, I think, they came from performing the

symphonies a lot. But then it depends on where you’re performing
them, and what does for the Concertgebouw doesn’t do for the Festival
Hall, etc. What does for the Coliseum won’t do for Covent Garden.

Presumably the acoustic has a big effect on tempo when you’re

conducting a work like the Requiem?
Oh, yes, the Requiem must have a cathedral acoustic. I don’t want to do
it anywhere else, because it doesn’t sound right to me any more.

Yes, but even within different cathedral acoustics there are some
things you can get away with in one cathedral when in another
you need to take a little more time for the texture to clarify itself.
Exactly. The Luftpause (absurd word!) can be as long as two or three
seconds in St. Paul’s, because you’ve got to let the last harmony disap¬
pear, or the last fortissimo, before you start. But then it helps to ar¬
ticulate the piece into architectural chunks, and I rather like that.

There’s a piece —by Albinoni, I think —that’s marked adagio e

staccato, which is an extraordinarily sustained slow movement,
for which I once discovered the explanation: It was played in a
church, and if you play it exactly the way it’s written, with each
note staccato, the acoustic looks after the rest, and it’s a marvel¬
ous legato line.
Yes. Meanwhile, in a very dry acoustic, you’re faced with the opposite
problem (as we are here in Covent Garden), which is that every note
sounds too short, because there isn’t enough acoustic to lengthen it.

Do you therefore, for example, do Benvenuto Cellini or The Tro¬

jans faster here?
Probably. And you try to play German music, as we were saying, with
the notes longer. You have to play the acoustic which isn’t there. It’s ex¬
traordinarily difficult. It doesn’t really work. It’s like the Festival Hall,
where things don’t congeal. Whereas if you’ve got a marvelous natural
acoustic, as in Symphony Hall in Boston or the Concertgebouw, it’s
much easier to get the right sound.

Berlioz, Stravinsky, and Mozart are the three composers you

used to conduct most. Obviously you’ve developed a much,
much wider repertoire now. But do you feel that you do conduct
 116
Conductors on Conducting

some composers’ music better than others? Is that an inborn

thing, a natural affinity?
I haven’t the faintest idea. I think it’s that at certain periods of one’s life
one was looking for some kind of expression of the forces that are gam¬
bolling about inside your guts—like molecules, aren’t they? And when I
was young I loved the exhilaration and aggression of Stravinsky, the
ferocity of the man, and now I’m older I don’t love that less, but I find
that I love an awful lot of other things just as much. Nothing could be in
a way further from Stravinsky than Sibelius. Sibelius is a horizontal
composer, in that sense, though rhythm plays a great part in his music.
It’s the way he makes instruments sing, and especially the strings —the
Palestrina-like string sonorities in Sibelius. I really love that very much. I
find it such a marvelous world. Someone said, “Well, if you like Sibelius
why don’t you like Nielsen?” Well, I’ve listened to a bit of Nielsen, and
I’ve thought, hell, I can’t play that, it sounds so footling—it doesn’t yet
speak to me. But in ten years I may listen to Nielsen and say, “My God,
now I see. What was I thinking before?”
One is ripe for certain kinds of experiences in certain times of
one’s life, and one is looking for them. But it was also that when 1 was
young no one was playing certain people. With Stravinsky, no one
played the Symphony in Three Movements or the Symphony in C or so
many of these pieces. And nobody was playing Berlioz. Nobody’s been
playing Sibelius recently. I try to avoid ... you know, when everybody’s
playing Mahler, for example, I’m not going to play Mahler along with
the rest. I’ve done Mahler’s Eighth Symphony a couple of times in the
Albert Hall. I must say that was a pretty shaking experience—a vast
choir, about 700, that kind of thing. And I love The Song of the Earth. I
think that’s my favorite piece of his, and Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and
those songs. But I’ve heard performances of the Fifth Symphony which
have made me want to just go out and scream, because it sounds like,
really, one damned thing after another. I had such an aversion to this
piece last time I heard it—whether it was the way it was played or
whether it was just me, who knows?
It doesn’t matter whether one’s feelings about these things are
wrong or right. It’s a very moral experience. After twenty-five years of
conducting music, you more or less know—if somebody’s asked you to
do any of the orchestral repertory—you’ll know how to organize it,
how it should sound. Whether you’ll respond to it in the kind of way
which will make it live for everybody else is not certain. But if you had
 117
Colin Davis on Berlioz

said to me, “Here is a piece of Debussy, now go and organize it, make it
sound like Debussy,” I’d have difficulty in that. One day, perhaps. ..
Well, Pelleas is something that has knocked me right out. I never knew
anything about Pelleas, but when I came to do it for the first time I just
fell in love with that piece, and now it’s one of the things I look forward
to most—fantastic. And doing Elektra is another thing. I’ve always
tended to be rather rude about Strauss, and I was confronted with this
task of conducting Elektra, following on the heels of Kempe and Solti
and Clemens Krauss and the people who’d done Strauss in Covent
Garden. And I sat up all night and really pulled myself together. I
reckoned, I know what this should sound like, so let’s do it, you know,
flat out. And it was one of the turning points for me in this opera house
because it was accepted. And now I’d rather like to do some more. And
so on.
Sometimes one doesn’t know what one can do until one is ac¬
tually thrust into a situation of having to do it. Bruckner is another com¬
poser I’ve laid off, because it was made such a fuss of and everybody was
doing Bruckner. The Seventh Symphony of Bruckner, the first and slow
movements of that, are, I think, some of the greatest music we have.
Bruckner is a really great melodist. I think we mentioned before—the
hint of Berlioz there. And development tunes—Elgar comes into that
too, though Elgar has his own way of writing melodies which turn back
on themselves and become a bit obsessive. Take the second subject of
the first movement of the Second Symphony: It’s a constant repetition
of the same shape of phrase, and it’s almost neurotic. But the slow
movements—take the slow movement of the Violin Concerto, and then
the slow movement of the First Symphony. That is his greatest move¬
ment, I think. And if I haven’t done much Elgar, there again this is a
question of not actually being in a position to do many concerts here in
England, and there being five orchestras, and who’s playing what. It’s
awfully difficult to find pieces so that I’m not working on what
somebody else is doing! There are only a limited number of pieces by
Elgar, as with Berlioz, and you can’t play all of them; all of you would
be playing them all the time.
Berlioz is somebody who has been with me all along. But now
it’s actually time for other people to do Berlioz—do you know what I
mean? I’ve made it available, it’s there, everybody can hear what it is if
they want, and now, you know, let’s hope he makes his way in the
world.
 118
Conductors on Conducting

The documentary evidence, so to speak, for Davis’s views on Berlioz is

unusually comprehensive. Having made one or two earlier discs for
Angel/EMI and Oiseau-Lyre, he embarked in 1963 on a Berlioz cycle
for Philips that by now embraces almost all of the composer’s orchestral
and choral output. Recordings of La Damnation de Faust, Harold in
Italy, Nuits d’ete, the Requiem (or Grande Messe des mortsj, Romeo et
Juliette, and Les Troyens will all serve to illustrate specific points
covered in our discussion.
But the two Davis recordings of the Fantastic Symphony pro¬
vide the most illuminating embodiment of his stylistic approach, as
much in their differences as in their similarities. The London Symphony
Orchestra version, released in 1964, seems to have been the first re¬
corded performance of the symphony to include both Berlioz’s “second
thought” cornet part in the “Ball” movement and the repeats in the first
movement and the “March to the Scaffold. ” It was widely welcomed as
setting the standard by which subsequent recordings of the Fantastic
Symphony would have to be judged. Insofar as there were reservations
to the critical applause, they concerned precisely the element of
Classicism in the performance that, as we have seen, Davis regards as
central to his conception of Berlioz. I found the performance amply ex¬
citing and felt its blend of the Classical and Romantic elements in
Berlioz to be perceptive and wonderfully satisfying. Yet, when Davis
re-recorded the work eleven years later with the Concertgebouw Or¬
chestra of Amsterdam, he surpassed that first achievement—and, sig¬
nificantly, surpassed it by heightening the Classicism of his reading
rather than by compromise. This time, as the “Ball” movement
demonstrates with particular clarity, a greater sense of relaxation in the
quieter passages earns, by sharper contrast, the dividend of increased
excitement when the animez markings are reached, without breaking
the bounds of the Classically-oriented style as conductors without
Davis’s truly Berliozian poise are apt to do.
The standard of this superb Concertgebouw performance re¬
flects two other interesting points. One is that Davis’s best recording
work since the early 1970s seems to have been done consistently with
non-English orchestras—witness the masterly collaboration with Ar¬
thur Grumiaux in the Beethoven Violin Concerto, recorded with the
Concertgebouw at about the same time as the Fantastic, and, more
recently, the Mendelssohn Italian Symphony and Midsummer Night’s
 119
Colin Davis on Berlioz

Dream music and the Sibelius symphony cycle made with the Boston
Symphony Orchestra. And what may not be unconnected with that is
the consideration, hinted at with characteristic delicacy by Bernard
Haitink in his interview, that London’s orchestral life in the late 1970s
has taken on a competitive tinge that makes real relaxation in perform¬
ance harder to achieve.
 Bernard
Haitink
on
Mahler
 PHONOGRAM INTERNATIONAL B.V./MIKE EVANS

MIKE EVANS
PHONOGRAM INTERNATIONAL B.V./CLIVE BARDA
 Over the past few years, the emphasis of Haitink’s career has been
shifting from an almost exclusive concentration on symphonic work
to a much more equal balance between the symphonic and. operatic
spheres. He still has the substantial responsibility of the Concert-
gebouw Orchestra, whose Principal Conductor he is, in his native
Amsterdam, of which he took sole charge in 1964 at the age of
thirty-five, after three years as co-conductor with Eugen Jochum. But
at the time we began trying to make our interview arrangements, it
had already been announced that he would not renew his engage¬
ment as Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra,
but would, in the summer 0/1978, take over as Musical Director of
the Glyndebourne Festival Opera. Such a change of orientation in¬
evitably means a great deal of pressure for any conductor, since he
has not only to master a new range of repertoire but also to reshape
his working habits to meet theatre needs. In recent seasons, Haitink
has also begun to be a regular guest at the Royal Opera House in
London, and it was during the run of his Don Giovanni there that
we finally managed to meet and talk.
To avoid living out of a suitcase during his many long
working periods in England, this semi-transplanted Dutchman has
an apartment in Cadogan Square, London. We taped our conversa¬
tion there in March 1977. The pressures surfaced once or twice, in
the shape of relatively fraught telephone calls. For the rest, our talk
was pleasantly relaxed, and much more fluent than Haitink’s prelimi¬
nary doubts might have suggested.

125
 T he way one starts to know a composer is important.
With Mahler, I didn’t have early roots as I did with
Bruckner. As a student in Holland, as a boy who loved
music—it was perhaps the only thing in my life—I always felt a certain
bond with Bruckner. I didn’t understand much about the formal side,
and yet the music meant something to me, like Beethoven, or Mozart to
a lesser extent. But Mahler was not there —Mahler started later, and my
interest began with the songs. I think this is a very important thing in
understanding Mahler: If you start with the songs, they are the bridge
that will in the end lead you automatically to The Song of the Earth.

Wasn’t there a strong tradition of Mahler performance in Am¬

sterdam under Willem Mengelberg?
You must remember that I grew up during the German occupation.
When my musical education started, at the age of eleven, Mahler was
simply forbidden—his music couldn’t be performed. That’s immensely
important, I think, in connection with some German conductors too.
When you observe, for example, how late Karajan came to Mahler—he
didn’t hear this music, let alone perform it, from 1935 until 1945.
My parents were very much against my going to the Concert-
gebouw during the occupation because Mengelberg collaborated with
the Germans. They had many Jewish friends, and my mother is partly
Jewish, and they were of course terribly upset at the things that hap¬
pened, especially in Amsterdam, which was a Jewish city. I went
because I was a fanatic, and I heard Mengelberg conduct. He didn’t
conduct Mahler. So the first Mahler symphony I heard was after the
war, and the first Mahler recording I heard was a little earlier—it was
the old Bruno Walter recording of The Song of the Earth, with Kerstin
Thorborg and Charles Kullman. From there I got to Alban Berg, I
think, and to this world of songs, this fantasy world full of the feelings
and the poetical aspects of nature. This is very important to the under-

127
 128
Conductors on Conducting

standing of Mahler, because he’s not primarily a symphonist like some

other composers. He was a song composer, and that makes the per¬
formance of his symphonies dangerous because, while he wrote sym¬
phonies of immense scope, still the song is always there as a germinating
factor. Then, too, he was a typical theatrical composer, just the man to
have written an opera, and it’s very tragic that he never did.
His symphonies are a whole cosmos, a whole world. Every¬
thing is in them, and the idea of the universe in some of them is an
illustration of his theatrical side. The whole Auferstehung idea —the
Resurrection—in the Second Symphony, with the offstage bands—
there’s a danger of becoming a bit kitschy. One has to be extremely
careful, I think, not to insist too much on the very obvious theatrical
effects. Still, for me, the real Mahler is not so much the Second Sym¬
phony or the Third, though I love them very much, but the Sixth Sym¬
phony and the Ninth, which are very tough works. The Sixth is not easy
to understand, but its finale is an incredible movement, and the first
movement of the Ninth, I think, is a masterstroke. He could, after all,
create tremendous symphonic forms.

It’s strange, with all the performances Mahler has now, to think
that at the time I was coming to his music, in the late 19505,
practically the only way to get to know the Sixth Symphony was
through the Eduard Flipse recording with the Rotterdam Philhar¬
monic Orchestra.
Yes, Flipse was marvelous at it. He was not such a good conductor, but
he did it, and he organized all the forces, and at that time it was a
tremendously enterprising thing to do.

You said that you heard your first Mahler symphony in the con¬
cert hall after the war—from whom?
Eduard van Beinum. That was the Second Symphony. And then I heard
Bruno Walter conduct the Fourth. I was tremendously impressed by
that. With the Second I was at a loss. I don’t think it was van Beinum’s
real forte at that time. Strange how receptive you are when you are
young. I was seventeen then, and I remember it as a very rhapsodic per¬
formance, and not very well worked out. At that period, van Beinum
was not a man who had a grip on the work. But I heard a marvelous
Mahler Second by Carl Schuricht shortly afterwards with the Hague
Philharmonic, which was then a very good orchestra.
 129
Bernard Haitink on Mahler

Was that before Willem van Otterloo was its conductor?

No, it was van Otterloo who made it a very good orchestra. He had
started already, and in his first two years he really built very firmly.
Then Schuricht came as a guest, and I was very impressed by his Mahler
Second, tremendously, and I lived with that symphony for years and
years—the first movement, the second especially, then the St. Antonius
von Padua scherzo and the “Urlichf ’ movement.

It’s interesting that you were attracted by particular movements.

Was this because you had come to the symphonies through the
songs?
That’s very interesting. I try to go backwards because of the songs...

Whereas the last movement of the Second Symphony is more

remotely related to the world of the songs.
I had difficulties with the last movement, because I felt at that time that
it burst out of a certain aesthetic field. I thought it was too much.

The all-inclusive approach?

Yes, though I don’t want to be just dry and academic, which I couldn’t
because I haven’t got the brains for that. What moved me so much with
Walter was that he really brought out all the qualities, including a cer¬
tain classical attitude in Mahler, a mildness that is very obvious in the
Fourth Symphony. That made a tremendous impression—all of a sud¬
den Mahler became a part of the heritage of classical music after
Schubert and Beethoven; all of a sudden the Fourth Symphony be¬
longed to it. Then I slowly started to understand it.
When I started later to conduct Mahler, I started with the
First Symphony. At that time, I had already been conducting for five or
six years. I hadn’t conducted a Mahler symphony yet, and people sud¬
denly began to say, “You must do it, try it.” And then I did.

When was that?

The 1960s, 1962, I think—no, later.

No, it was earlier. I can tell you it was earlier than that because I
heard your first concert in the 1960-1961 season with the Con-
certgebouw Orchestra, and you did Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.
That early? My goodness! I was young then! Well, I started conducting
 130
Conductors on Conducting

in the late 1950s, in 1957 I think, so I didn’t wait that long to conduct
Mahler after all. The Fifth Symphony was the second Mahler sym¬
phony I did—I started with the First Symphony. It was van Beinum’s
idea. He said, “You must do the Mahler Fifth.” I was flabbergasted, of
course. I couldn’t understand it. I tried it out first on the radio, in a
Holland Festival concert with the Radio Philharmonic—I think I did it
the same way with the Mahler First. To cut a long story short, my ap¬
proach to conducting Mahler very obviously stemmed from the songs,
and I think it’s still a very crucial thing in Mahler symphonies that the
whole idea of the songs is there as the germ.

Does this affect specific technical decisions that you make as a

conductor?
Yes, it does, because songs are chamber music, and so you get a very
nearly schizophrenic feeling when you hear or conduct a work of
Mahler. On one side you have this very moving aspect of the music—
even when there is no vocal part, there are moments that are so crucial
and so intimate—and then all of a sudden you have these immense out¬
bursts of anguish, of fierce feelings about everything, nearly hysterical,
sometimes very powerful. But maybe that’s one of the reasons that so
many young people are so attracted to Mahler—his immense scope.
Beethoven and Mozart don’t have that—it is more obvious with
Mahler.

This, presumably, affects tempo, phrasing, orchestral texture,

dynamics—all these things —when you’re conducting a sym¬
phony.
Yes. But you must always remember that it is a symphony, so that you
must try to relate different subjects to each other, and you must be very
careful to do that, because Mahler was a very good conductor, and all
his warnings to conductors—]a, nichteilen [“do not rush”], and so on,
thousands of them in the scores, you know, with this caution, it’s in¬
credible-mean that he was very careful about all these things.

Presumably having discovered the dangers in actual

performance...
Of course—that an orchestra, or maybe one of his conducting col¬
leagues, could easily rush or hold back too much, overdo things. What’s
very interesting, and you know about that of course, is these existing
piano rolls that Mahler made. He plays a part of the first movement of
 131
Bernard Haitink on Mahler

the Fifth Symphony, for example, on the piano, and it’s fascinating to
hear that he doesn’t milk it at all as many of my dear colleagues do. Of
course, his piano playing is a composer’s piano playing, more or less
schematic playing, because his mind naturally corrects and adds to it.
Still, it is very interesting to hear it. He also did a piano roll of the last
movement of the Fourth.

I’ve heard those two. They are the only two, aren’t they?
I’m afraid so, yes. But they’re a hint, I think, to be very careful with his
instructions to the conductor, and not to overdo things, because they
are so meticulously written and carefully printed in the score. On the
other hand, there is his famous remark that the most important thing is
behind the notes, and not the notes themselves. That’s true, too, but
that’s another thing. There are these very small points like making a
cantabile more cantabile, or a texture more incisive, or whatever. These
are very small things, but very important things, I think—they make the
difference between an adequate and a good performance.

But things, as you’ve said, that you have to get absolutely to the
right degree—you mustn’t do them too much.
You must get a feeling for the writing. I’m not advocating a pedestrian
performance. Your perception must be very, very keen. You must
develop an ear for what is really in the style, what belongs and what
doesn’t. That’s something you work three weeks in the month over.
You develop an ear for yourself, and of course you hope that you are
right, and you do certain things, but you must not do anything that
bursts the bounds of the style.

It has to belong to the world of Mahler’s music.

Yes, every composer has his own world, his own style, his own poles.
For example, think of the Don Giovanni overture, which I’m doing at
the moment. The introduction is marked andante, but there are many
ways to see an andante. You can choose a tempo that’s a little bit
slower, or a little bit faster, but still it has to be in the style of the com¬
position. There are always some possibilities on both sides. But if you
make an andante into an adagio, then you are out of style.

Though the tempo might be one that would suit, say, a Brahms
andante.
Yes, exactly.
 132
Conductors on Conducting

More generally on the question of style, do you think it’s fair to

speak of an Austrian or an Austro-German style in music?
I would like to add an Austrian-Bohemian style to your question, I
think. Mahler was born in Bohemia , and his memories of his youth—
the military music, Bohemian folk music—I think that’s so important in
his symphonies, especially in the Fifth and in the Third—the long
posthom solo. I think that’s very Central European. If you say an Aus¬
trian and Austrian-Bohemian style in Mahler I agree with you — Aus¬
trian-Bohemian more than Austrian-German. I think of Brahms as
North German style, and Mahler is very far away from that.

Would you see a link back with Haydn because of the Bohemian
or Croatian influence in Haydn?
There’s a Hungarian influence in Haydn sometimes, I think, and also
maybe some Croatian. The climate is very close in all of these. Haydn is
much more healthy than Mahler, of course.

But thinking about that posthorn solo in the Third Symphony,

there isn’t another composer outside Mahler that 1 feel closer to
in that passage than Haydn.
Schubert—Schubert songs.

Yes, but it’s the sort of open-air, foresty, Middle European

mystical communion-with-nature sort of atmosphere.
Ah, yes, which I am very fond of. It’s always very touching when you
come across such a moment.

You feel this even as a Northern European?

Oh, yes.

It’s a very Southern European feeling in a way, isn’t it?

There are parts of Europe that are so important for music. If I can’t see a
mountain for a week, then I’ve lost a certain contact. Central Europe
— Switzerland, Austria, that part, starting from Munich on —is so ex¬
tremely crucial for this sort of music.

The Carinthian Alps and places of that kind. Do you feel when
you go there that you’re getting something in...
It comes automatically...
 133
Bernard Haitink on Mahler

... and that it comes out in conducting Mahler?

It’s so strange, when I walk in the mountains, automatically the music
starts. It’s very strange. It has been two years since I was there—I
couldn’t make it since then—but I still have a contact with the music.
You feel the climate is there. Maybe it is a little postcard-kitsch, I don’t
know.

Well, to some extent that’s part of Mahler, as it was of Berg.

And how, and how!

Even down to Berg’s songs on postcard texts!

Yes!

How far does any of this affect you when you’re actually stand¬
ing in front of an orchestra?
At that moment I don’t have any time for it. However, sometimes I have
associations when I conduct. When I conduct a work, when I really
know it, when it is really in my system, then sometimes I allow myself
some nature associations. It’s the first time I’ve mentioned this. I’m
always ashamed of it—w'ell, not ashamed, but it’s not something you
need to tell people about. It comes naturally. First comes the music,
then comes the association. It’s not that I think about a certain picture
and then the music starts—that’s not it. The association comes out of
the music in my case.

And each gives to the other, reciprocally, and, presumably, the

feeling of the performance will grow.
Of course. There are links: Mahler loved the mountains, and he always
went there to get rid of all the troubles of his daily life. He relaxed there,
and he was very creative there, and you hear all of this in his music.
There are certain works by other composers, too, that are closely linked
with nature: Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto, which he wrote at
Toblach, I think, on the north shore of the lake. And there’s a sort of
happy, relaxed feeling in the last movement, I think, where you feel that
being where he was helped him.

Many of the late Brahms works were written, of course, at

various resorts like Thun and the Worther See.
The violin sonatas—I think it’s very important there.
 134
Conductors on Conducting

Supposing that you were a conductor who was born and grew up
in Holland, where there are only the mountains of Limburg
which are fairly limited in scope, let us say you had never been
out of Holland. Would that, according to what you’ve been say¬
ing, make it much more difficult for you to conduct Mahler?
No, because it isn’t that I went to the mountains and for that reason I
like Mahler or Bruckner. It was because of the music that I wanted to go
there, you see? The mountains part came afterwards.

But, plainly, the continued acquaintance with their physical

world does give you something that you then give back through
the music?
Yes. I think it gives me something. And that I don’t go now doesn’t
make a difference, because I know how it is. I know how it is to be in the
mountains—when I close my eyes and concentrate I know how it feels. I
know the sea. So —it’s very strange to talk like this, I have never talked
this way—when once you have seen it, it’s enough, because you know
how it is. I think you should go to the source of the marvels of these
geniuses who composed their most important works there, and relax in
those surroundings.

There’s a very important distinction here between what you’re

saying, which 1 completely agree with, which is that by an ac¬
quaintance with a tradition and a background one can imbibe
and absorb that background; and on the other hand the view
that some of my colleagues, particularly in the United States,
take, which I might call the ethnic school of criticism, by which a
Giulini performance of Brahms is always an Italianate perform¬
ance, and so on.
That’s nonsense.

And that only a Frenchman can conduct, say, Ravel.

Absolute nonsense. You know how Monteux was. He was pestered his
whole life with this French music, which he didn’t like at all — he wanted
to play Brahms and Bach.

And English music. His conducting of the Enigma Variations is

one of the supreme performances—and yours, too, for that mat¬
ter, and you’re a Dutchman!
 135
Bernard Haitink on Mahler

Strange, isn’t it? But I think it is very primitive to say that someone is a
Swiss conductor so he can only conduct Honegger.

I agree with you completely. One of the things that’s always

amused me is that the American critics never seem to apply this
to American conductors conducting anything —that’s all right,
you know, they’re allowed to. But on this question of natural
affinity, why is it that a given conductor becomes associated with
a particular composer? Is it something that’s in him from the very
start, or is it a matter of the direction that his musical training
takes?
I did not have this affinity for Mahler’s music in the beginning. I had to
develop it.

Whereas you had it naturally with Bruckner.

Yes. But still it’s when you grow fond of a piece, when you love a piece,
when you are fascinated by it, that you are going to develop this affinity
in the course of events. It is a matter of getting interested, getting
fascinated. But there are some composers—Falla and Borodin, for ex¬
ample—that I don’t like at all. I don’t have any affinity for them.

Have you conducted them and been unsatisfied with the results?
I haven’t conducted them. Maybe that’s a mistake. Maybe the moment I
start to tackle the job I will develop a feeling for their styles. I doubt if
there is a special Borodin style, but maybe there is one. The thing is that
I’m not interested in this sort of Romantic quasi-folksong music, like
Falla —not folksong, but you understand what I mean —Spanish-
influenced music. But maybe if I were to dig my teeth into that I would
start to understand it and like it, even to love it.

Isn’t Mahler also a folksong-oriented composer?

Yes, but he is totally different, and I think it’s because he stems from
Schubert and from the great European musical tradition. I think I’m a
little bit more unsure about my tastes with the peripheral countries,
Spain, and Russia, and that sort of thing.

In other words, because of the history of Western music right

from the time of Bach, with his use of chorales, going back
beyond that to Heinrich Isaac and people like that with their
 136
Conductors on Conducting

varied materials, there is a link between the folk music and the
art music, and the two developed together...
I think so.

... whereas, when the nationalist countries from the periphery

came in, it was too late for an identity?
Maybe, with one exception: Bartok. I think his way of using folk music
is a marvelous way to integrate that sort of music in his works. Bartok is
the only exception, for me. I think he is a really great composer. The
other ones I find are second-rate composers, or at least not on the level
of a Bartok.

I know plenty of tenth-rate composers, so being second-rate is

fine. Do you know Beecham’s remark about second-rate-ness? He
said: “I can never quite understand why we in Britain are always
giving posts to third-rate conductors from abroad when we have
so many second-rate ones of our own. ”
He was right.

If I may come back to this point, how do you think it came

about that you had an immediate feeling for Bruckners' Was it
partly because when you were young you were hearing Bruckner,
because his music was permitted during the occupation?
Maybe. Or maybe because Bruckner is more straightforward to listen
to. Mahler is more complicated.

Bruckner is an innocent composer. Perhaps to understand Mahler

you have to be post-adolescent, to have gone through the
unhealthy period.
Yes. I think that could be. It’s an interesting point.

Which is what you said in essence when you were talking about
the schizophrenia of Mahler.
Yes. That’s the reason I don’t conduct Mahler that often. I always plan
my season very, very carefully, and I only do one or two Mahler sym¬
phonies, because it really gets on your nerves if you conduct it too often.
It’s very dangerous, I think —it’s so exhausting, and you become so
nihilistic! Really, if you do the Fifth Symphony, for example, too
often... I did it on tour, four or five times, and that’s the limit.
Well, that’s over now, and I don’t have any Mahler sympho-
 137
Bernard Haitink on Mahler

nies for the time being, and I can go back to more classical things. You
have to be very careful with yourself. It becomes top-heavy if you have
too many Mahler symphonies in one period —it’s not good for the or¬
chestra or the conductor, because it takes so much out of everyone.
And, apart from that, I don’t want to concentrate too much on one
thing. There are so many things that make life, and musical life, worth¬
while, why should I stick to one particular direction?

We’ve spoken about the feeling of Mahler, the emotional side of

the music. Can we turn to the question of his characteristic
sonorities?
The matter of sonority is very important. It is quite easy to let the brass
and percussion produce a top-heavy effect—it’s really easy to let the
devil loose, to make so much noise as possible, which is a very
dangerous and unpleasant habit. Of course, when Mahler writes for¬
tissimo it should be fortissimo, but you must be very careful what is
fortissimo. Mahler writes a very complicated texture. He never writes
fortissimo for the whole orchestra. It’s always one orchestral section
fortissimo, the other section forte-piano, or a crescendo in one section
and a diminuendo in the other. He wanted a differentiated sonority, not
the massive block of sound that Bruckner calls for. Mahler is much
more differentiated, and the conductor must be very careful to bring
that out, so it doesn’t make sense to pull out all the stops too much. You
must be very careful to distinguish wThat is important and what is not
important.

Your point about the ease of letting the percussion and brass be¬
come too prominent implies that one must bear in mind the
string-based sonority of the whole. This contrasts with the point
you were making about the songs and their chamber-music quali¬
ty. One feels that Mahler is more likely than most composers to
put a woodwind or a brass soloist on a level with the strings. But
you are saying that Mahler’s orchestra is, nevertheless, in the
symphonic tradition, still a string-based ensemble?
Yes. I always mention to an orchestra when we are rehearsing a Mahler
symphonic piece, it is loud, but in that loudness we should still hear the
strings. Another danger comes from the very limited range that the
woodwinds have when compared with the brass. When Mahler writes a
so-called unison for woodwinds and brass, mostly you hear the brass.
The conductor must level it out and balance it out so that you can hear
 138
Conductors on Conducting

the woodwinds too. I think in Mahler’s time the brass was not as loud
as it is now. I think that the German trumpets were more mellow in
sound. I still feel, when I come to a German orchestra, that the brass
players are able to produce a mellower sound —in Vienna they still play
these old horns, and they have a more mellow sound than the newer
horns.

Does that mean that when you conduct Mahler in Vienna it

takes less work to attain the right balance in passages of this
kind?
Yes, maybe. I have never conducted Mahler in Vienna, but I have done
Bruckner, and it was obvious that the brass sound is different from
what we’re used to farther west.

Compare the sounds that, say, Zubin Mehta has made in

Bruckner recordings with the Vienna Philharmonic and the sound
that he made when he was conducting the Los Angeles or¬
chestra—there is a definite difference with the same conductor.
Oh, yes, because every orchestra to a certain degree will go with you,
but the Viennese will by instinct not go beyond a certain limit. And that
has to do with the special sort of instruments they use. I think the far¬
ther west you go the more brilliant the sound becomes, and the farther
east the more mellow, until you get to Russia, where all of a sudden the
brass is again very loud. But that has more to do with temperament; I
think they have more extremes in their character.

One general point that’s emerging is the constant necessity for

restraints of all kinds in conducting Mahler.
For restraints? Well, there was a time when people used to write that I
was too restrained. I think I have overcome that now. And maybe
sometimes I’m not restrained enough, I don’t know. Still, you must
know exactly, when you start a forte here, that in half an hour’s time
there is a fortissimo coming, and twenty minutes later a fff, and if you
overdo the first you spoil the second and third.

That’s why you and Boult do the Schubert Ninth Symphony so

well—those triple climaxes, in which the third one must always
be the highest peak.
I heard him conduct it two weeks ago —incredible. That old man! In¬
credible! He’s really great.
 139
Bernard Haitink on Mahler

Could we continue with your point about the characteristics of

orchestras in different places? You conduct a great many or¬
chestras, but you do most of your work, presumably, with the
Concertgebouw and the London Philharmonic. Do you feel a
difference when you’re approaching a Mahler performance with
those two orchestras? Try not to be libelous!
Well, here in London I have to work very hard with the strings to get a
warm sound, an intense sound, and so that they don’t dig in too much,
because the whole feeling of competitiveness in the active musical life
here makes the players sit on the edge of their seats and play that way.
And the brass in London is always so brilliant, I have to put them back a
little bit. In Amsterdam I have to work more with the winds, with the
brass. The woodwinds have a very natural feeling for Mahler in Am¬
sterdam, that’s all right, and the strings have a marvelous warm sound
— perhaps that’s because of the hall. London’s Festival Hall is murder¬
ous because the orchestra has to work so hard, the strings have to labor
so hard, to get something. But when you play with the London Philhar¬
monic in a beautiful hall, like Vienna or Carnegie Hall, all of a sudden
the whole sound blossoms, and then you hear what you want without
so much hard work. Symphony Hall in Boston, Carnegie Hall—you
don’t have to go that far from London for there’s a very good hall in
Manchester, the Free Trade Hall, and the Huddersfield Town Hall is
marvelous —an old-fashioned town hall with a wooden ceiling, and it
sounds marvelous.

Is it one of those 18805 halls? Many of the great halls were built
at that period, for some reason. The Concertgebouw was 1888,

wasn’t it? And Carnegie Hall was just a couple of years later.
I don’t know if the Huddersfield hall is from that time, but it could be.

Have you conducted Mahler with American orchestras?

Yes—the Ninth Symphony in Cleveland. I was very impressed with the
Cleveland Orchestra. I was very impressed with their eagerness to work
on every note. George Szell had just died and the meticulousness was
still in their system. Szell was such a marvelous musician, he had trained
that orchestra so well. There was much warmth in the orchestra, and
much schmalz also.

It’s interesting to hear you say that, because I’ve always thought
of him as a very cold musician. You don’t agree?
 140
Conductors on Conducting

No, I don’t agree. I think he tried to be a very cold musician, but he

wasn’t basically. And his orchestra was not cold. I remember the first
time I came to that orchestra, and I had to start with Don Juan, and I
was so impressed, so impressed with what he had done. If he had really
been a cold musician I don’t think he could have created that orchestra.
Szell worked so much on the sound. He appeared cold and he did
everything to displease people. That’s a psychological thing. I can’t
trace why he behaved that way. But I think he had a very good feeling
for this mid-European style —he came from there, he was born in Buda¬
pest and his music studies were in Vienna.

I heard him do the Mozart G Minor Symphony and Mahler’s

Das Lied von der Erde in the Concertgebouw in i960, or 1961,
and I was not moved once. How one could achieve that with
those two works is beyond me!
Yes, but at that time he had a poor rapport with the Concertgebouw
Orchestra. There was something incompatible. At that time the or¬
chestra was not in very good shape, you know. Van Beinum had died,
and Jochum had not been there long enough. And Jochum in those days
didn’t rehearse very well —now, yes, but not at that time.

He’s blossomed.
Ah—an Indian summer!

It’s like Monteux in his later years.

Exactly, yes.

But you think the problem with Szell was the relationship of con¬
ductor and orchestra?
It didn’t go well in Amsterdam. Afterwards, when the orchestra was
much more settled, they admired him much more, and it was marvel¬
ous. I remember a G Minor Symphony ten years later, just before he
died, that was marvelous, marvelous. It’s interesting, sometimes I hear
recordings of the Cleveland Orchestra with Szell and I think, Oh, my
goodness, it’s very loud, and very well put together, but there’s no
warmth in it. But the orchestra itself was so beautiful. That must be his
work, must be.

I’m getting much more of a sense of the ambivalence of Szell as I

grow older myself.
 141
Bernard Haitink on Mahler

A very complicated man, very complicated. I think he had a love-hate

relationship to music and to people. I think he loved music basically. He
could be very unpleasant, but he was one of the best craftsmen in the
field.

And yet I was just comparing the reissue of the Szell recording of
Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony with Colin Davis’s Boston per¬
formance, and hearing Davis shape the lengths of the ends of
those phrases in the first movement— the difference between a
dotted crotchet and a crotchet and a quaver—whereas with Szell
they all come out as quavers. There’s the same kind of care¬
lessness about nuance—about exact note values —at the be¬
ginning of the Mozart Symphony no. 34 in Szell’s recording. But
let’s get back to Mahler. There’s a question I’d like to ask you
about that arose for me when I heard, for the first time, the
Mengelberg recording of the Fourth Symphony. It has to do with
that tempo change right at the beginning, where there’s a gap...
A tremendous long ritardando.

Yes, which Mengelberg makes tremendously long in the violins,

but it doesn’t affect the woodwinds. The flutes and bells have
finished long before the violins get to the end of the measure.
Now, the first time I heard it I thought. Oh, how dreadful, how
careless! But more and more I wonder whether that rhythmic in¬
dependence of lines isn’t something that is essential to the Mahler
style—like the cuckoo sounds, or not cuckoo sounds exactly but
shrill piccolo fanfares, in the first movement of the Third Sym¬
phony, which go in a tempo different from the rest of the or¬
chestra.
Oh, yes, that’s typical Mahler.

And this is something that, presumably, compels you to exercise

a much looser control of ensemble?
Yes. In the case of Mengelberg I think that he exaggerated it enor¬
mously, especially at the end of his life. Mengelberg was a totally dif¬
ferent person in the late 1920s from what he was in the late 1930s. By the
1930s he pushed the music around much more—he knew it too well, the
orchestra knew it too well, and he could do what he wanted. So it is
very dangerous to judge Mengelberg from the existing recordings,
because too often we only judge him as a man of sixty-five.
 142
Conductors on Conducting

That’s interesting, because fairly recently, when I was working

on a book about Brahms, I heard for the first time the Mengel-
berg recording of Brahms’s Third Symphony, which is much
straighter...
You see?

... and it’s earlier, it’s 1932. And the Academic Festival Overture
on the same record—a masterly performance, one of the greatest
performances of the work I’ve ever heard—is from 1930, and
straight in style.
One of my teachers when I was young told me that he heard Mengel-
berg in 1929 in New York, and he said it was incredible—much more
talented than he was in the late 1930s.

Nonetheless, is there a germ in that independence of lines that is

essential?
Yes, of course. Mahler writes many times in blocks—a woodwind
block, a brass block, and a string block—and they all have their own
lives. That’s typical Mahler. And the feeling of ambivalence, so many
feelings together in one moment, sometimes terribly complicated.
Tenderness and coldness together, for example.

Which comes out in the last movement of the Ninth Symphony,

where you have simultaneously a line molto espressivo and
another line senza espressione. Is that hard to do?
Oh yes, very. There’s a place in that movement where the violins have
to play without any espressivo, and they always want to give more,
because instinct is associated with it, and all the time you have to hold
back.

Is that something you have to spend a lot of time on in rehearsal?

You have to insist on it at rehearsal, and then you have to indicate it
during the performance or they all go back to a normal, pedestrian
espressivo.

Mahler is one of the very few great composers in the Romantic

tradition where one has to avoid expression so often. Kathleen
Terrier was a marvelous singer, but in her recording of Das Lied
von der Erde with Bruno Walter it seems to me that she misses so
 143
Bernard Haitink on Mahler

much of “Der Abschied” because she was unable to sing senza

espressione, because there was so much espressivo in that woman
that it had to come out. You probably very rarely have to stop
people expressing themselves when you’re conducting Brahms or
Bruckner.
You’re right, but still, there’s a sort of middle-of-the-road espressivo
which I hate—“automatic pilot” I always call it. And sometimes it
works wonders when you ask for non -espressivo here, but there es¬
pressivo. But then I’m still at a very early stage with that idea; I have to
work it out.

Does that mean that in a Mahler melodic line one will emphasize
certain notes by the use o/vibratof
We should. I haven’t done that enough yet. I should—it’s a new field, I
think. The vibrato at that time was totally different from today’s vibra¬
to. You can hear the difference on very old recordings of Joseph
Joachim, where he doesn’t use vibrato at all except at very special mo¬
ments. And sometimes in the actual score even Beethoven, I think,
writes the direction vibrato. You have to use it there; but that means it
wasn’t taken for granted that you used vibrato all the time. Nowadays,
everything goes like that.

Well, certainly in the eighteenth century they only used vibrato

on long notes.
Yes, or, when you had semiquaver passages, on the top note of each
group. But I don’t know if you can mix that nowadays. I’m very doubt¬
ful about those people —I call them musical vegetarians—who insist on
Bach on original instruments and without vibrato. I think it’s very
dangerous, but then I’m not sure.

I’m almost on that side about Bach, simply because I’ve heard so
much Bach played that way that now, when I hear him played
the other way, on modern instruments, it sounds odd.
Yes, that’s not wrong.. . you’re right. I’m in a very difficult position at
the moment, and I’m aware of it. I’m not an intellectual musician, but
I’m not primitive enough just to leave it as it is, so I’m at a moment when
I can’t conduct any Bach, because I haven’t found out the solution. It’s
in the refrigerator at the moment, in the icebox, because I don’t know
what to do with it.
 144
Conductors on Conducting

In Mahler a comparable thing might be, say, the use of glissando.

Yes!

The First Symphony has cases, for example, in the first move¬
ment, where, if you compare all the available recordings, the
range of different approaches to the glissando is astonishing.
How far does one go with things like that?
It’s a question of good taste — and sometimes it is not meant by Mahler
as good taste. That’s the point.

Presumably, when Mahler was conducting it was much more

the accepted thing that one glissandoed a great deal.
Much more. And when we hear the glissandi Mengelberg asked from
his orchestra, I can’t stand it, but it was in style, I’m sure. There was a
time when I didn’t want any glissandi, but now I’m not that puritanical
any more —a false puritanism, of course. If you are really puritanical,
you should allow every glissando that’s marked! Now, I try to find a
compromise, and do it in good taste. But once more, what’s good taste?

Once, when 1 was writing about Mahler, I suggested that taste

in the performance of his works means knowing when you’re
being vulgar.
That’s a very good thing to say.

If you’re never vulgar in Mahler, then you are not playing him
with taste, because the taste extends so far that vulgarity must
come within its range.
Yes, that’s interesting—when you get rid of vulgarity, you are not in
style. This element in Mahler stems from the military music—the in¬
fluences of his youth —when he heard a military band passing by.

It’s the use of the deliberately banal, as in the last movement of

the Second Symphony—this is the Last Judgment, but it’s also a
military march. Does that mean that, when you come to a move¬
ment of this kind, you have to emphasize particularly the
qualities that come into the music from outside—emphasize, in
this case, the military rhythms?
Yes, of course. A point that fascinates me is that, when Mahler uses that
sort of military thing, he always writes for E-flat clarinet and piccolo,
 145
Bernard Haitink on Mahler

and that’s always very dangerous for intonation. But sometimes I think
the reason he wrote for those instruments there is that he wanted it a lit¬
tle bit out of tune.

This would apply, say, to that extraordinary passage using four

piccolos in unison in the first movement of the Third Symphony?
Yes. I don’t think it is beauty of sound that you want there, but incisive
sound.

So, in fact, one doesn’t waste a lot of time at a rehearsal getting

those absolutely plumb in tune?
Well now, there’s a difference between playing that’s just not good
enough, and playing that’s too refined. When you want a certain special
effect you have to work on it. For example, the double bass solo in
Mahler’s First Symphony. Almost all double bass players — it’s their on¬
ly chance of a solo —play out too much and you have to work hard to
get it without vibrato, very even in sound. You’ve got to get a menacing
feeling. And then I tell the musicians, “Please, don’t play too beautiful¬
ly.” They are always very surprised to hear that, but you have to work
for that, that certain special feeling.

It’s an extraordinarily difficult movement. I’ve very, very rarely

heard a performance of it where there is not a crescendo as the
other instruments come in —is that something too that you have
to work on a great deal?
Well, of course, it starts with the double bass. He starts to play too loud
because he wants to be heard, so you have to tell him, “Please, you are
playing alone, so don’t worry!” Good. So then he gets nervous, he
doesn’t dare to play piano. Then the bassoon comes in, and finally you
get the double bass to play at a true piano, and then the bassoon can’t
cope with that, so you have to bring the level up a little bit more, and
then every instrument adds a little more, and it makes it louder and
louder and louder. Again, sometimes I wonder whether Mahler meant
it that way; but still he writes piano, piano, piano, in the score.

Perhaps, being a very practiced professional musician, he would

write it that way to minimize the crescendo, but he would never¬
theless be aware that there would be a growth of tone, because
it’s almost unnatural and impossible to avoid.
 146
Conductors on Conducting

Yes, especially when the English horn comes in. His piano is much
more than the first horn, he can play much more quietly. So there are all
sorts of difficulties to level it and at the same time bring that out.

Apart from musical problems of this kind, what do you feel

about the difficulties of establishing accurate scores of the sym¬
phonies? Obviously the problem is not nearly as bad as it is with
Bruckner, but still there are textual problems in Mahler—
different editions, as of the First Symphony.
Oh, that whole Bruckner thing, this Nowak edition and so on —I don’t
like that at all. It’s quite a ridiculous situation with Bruckner’s Eighth
Symphony—unforgivable, I think. Mahler himself drives you mad, be¬
cause he corrected his scores so many times. All those corrections he
made in the Fifth Symphony and the Third, and if he had lived longer he
would have corrected the Ninth, The Song of the Earth, and so on and
so on, I’m sure. There is the Mahler Society edition, wrhich seems to be
all right. I’m a little bit doubtful about his disciples, if that’s the word.
These people who want to do better than he did. Sometimes I think it’s a
little bit pedantic, this new edition, because Mahler was first of all a
practical man who knew the orchestra as a conductor, and there are
very unpractical things in this new edition, I think. It’s a matter of using
your musical ears and your brains.

Do you mean questions like what octave some passages in the

Sixth and Seventh Symphonies are written in?
Yes, I think that’s a very practical example. I would rather stick to the
normal thing, which makes it much more clear, much more intense. But
the fact is that Mahler was always unsure about such things, and he
always changed them, and it had to do, of course, with different halls,
different orchestras. He would have gone on making changes as long as
he was alive, I’m sure.

What about the two very different versions of the First Sym¬
phony, one of them with a lot of extra woodwind and brass
writing and timpani?
Apart from any small differences, what is important is that the reason
for Mahler’s changes was always to make the texture clearer. Clarity
— that’s very important. So I think the second edition of the Fifth Sym¬
phony is much better than the first one, because it’s much more clear,
 147
Bernard Haitink on Mahler

much less heavy and thick in texture. That’s what he wanted. And he
cut things out in the First Symphony similarly.

Like the bar of muted horns in the finale?

Yes, that sort of thing.

Is that something he took out later?

Oh, yes. In general he removed rather than added. He removed all the
time, because he wanted the music to be not too heavy. He wanted
clarity. I don’t accept expressions like, Well, that line doesn’t have to be
heard because it’s not important. I don’t believe in that. I think
everything that can possibly be heard should be heard, because Mahler
wrote it.

With Mahler, more than most composers, one mustn’t miss a

line. Do you think with Richard Strauss perhaps the total effect is
sometimes more important than that kind of detail?
I’m doubtful about that too. First of all, Strauss is very often played far
too heavily. When you hear the Vienna Philharmonic play Strauss, it’s
much lighter than you might expect. People like Karl Bohm, they use a
much lighter touch —it’s very interesting. And I think you can hear
many, many things in Strauss. He did a stupid thing, to tell people,
“Well, it’s not important, you needn’t play all the notes.” He loved
Mozart so much, I can’t imagine how he could not insist on hearing
everything!

Is there anything in Mahler scores that you have to change?

No, I nearly never do.

“Nearly never”?
I don’t think ever in Mahler. Sometimes it was confusing because we
had the old orchestral material that Mengelberg used, with his “correc¬
tions” of Mahler. But then we got the new edition, and then I didn’t find
it necessary to change things—well, in small ways, but nothing of any
substance, just as I never change things in Beethoven nor in Schumann.
I haven’t performed any Schumann symphonies, so I am on slightly
difficult territory. But with Beethoven, no, nearly, nearly never. Not
doubling wind parts, either. Well, in the Ninth I double, and some oc¬
taves I do, but very seldom. Because Beethoven knew what he was
 148
Conductors on Conducting

writing. He accepted the limitations of the instruments. You should not

be too slick.

You started by talking about Mahler as essentially a song com¬

poser. When you’re working with singers in Mahler, do they
have special problems that you have to help them with?
There’s a special Mahler singer breed. You belong to it or you don’t be¬
long to it, and if you don’t belong to it you never can learn. It has to do
with the actual timbre of the voice. Janet Baker is ideal —when you’re
conducting, you learn from her, and you just accept it and are happy
that she sings that way. She has just the right expression and the right
sort of voice for it.

That’s interesting, because, in contrast with conducting, you are

saying that in the case of singing the affinity is inborn.
Yes, it really is. Singers are fascinating, because the voice is the most
musical instrument. It is in the human system, and a good singer who
uses his or her voice in the right way is at the very root of musical ex¬
pression. And Janet is one of the examples, I think.

Among the various Mahler movements with voice, the one that
might pose the most special problems is perhaps the first move¬
ment of The Song of the Earth, because of the difficulty the tenor
has in getting through the orchestral texture. Is there any way the
conductor can solve that?
Well, you have to try to keep the orchestra down, but then you can miss
a lot of musical expression.

And again, how much of that would Mahler, as a practical con¬

ducting musician, have understood from the start— that if his or¬
chestra plays with the necessary fire and the necessary devil in
that movement, then certainly some of the tenor’s notes are go¬
ing, as it were, to emerge from behind the orchestra?
I’m sure that, if he had lived longer, he would have lightened the scor¬
ing. But as he didn’t live longer, I think no one of us is authorized to do
that. So we should leave it as it is, because only Mahler knew how to do
it.

That implies that you simply have to use more restraint than
usual there.
 149
Bernard Haitink on Mahler

Yes, I find it always a very difficult movement, and it depends on the

singer. There are not that many tenors who really can cope with it. It’s
always a very embarrassing movement, very difficult to get right.

The only performance I’ve ever been almost totally convinced by

was Julius Patzak’s — that’s an unbelievable singer.
For Das Lied you ideally need two tenors. You would have a Helden-
tenor who can sing the first song, and a light lyric tenor for the other
ones.

Have you ever thought of doing it that way?

No, I didn’t dare to do that even though the man is so exhausted after
the first song!

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a totally, utterly convincing perform¬

ance of the work all through, actually—you’re right.
No. People are always extremely moved, and my own feeling is always,
yes, it worked, but it could have been better. It’s a very strange thing.

You haven’t been satisfied with the performance yourself?

I was very happy with the collaboration with Janet Baker, I think she
sings it marvelously. But yes, to perform Das Lied is one of the very
difficult things. And also the idea of the piece: They are songs, but it is a
symphony for two voices. It is not symphonic in form, of course, it’s
symphonic in another way. There are these two things again. Indeed,
it’s one of the most personal works of Mahler, combining the intimate
side and the more dramatic things which the orchestra underlines so
heavily. It’s difficult to talk about. Maybe it is performed too often. A
conductor should not do it too often; he should leave it for special oc¬
casions. I try to let years pass when I don’t conduct it. It should not
become a repertory piece. You need to work on it, and when an orches¬
tra knows it and you can do it in one rehearsal it is not right, not right.

A piece like the First Symphony doesn’t have that feeling.

That always keeps fresh. That’s the symphony I have performed most,
and it never bores me because it is such a fresh start of a symphonic cy¬
cle. But The Song of the Earth, there you really feel that Mahler has lived
through a whole life.

Too much to take too often—overdose!

 150
Conductors on Conducting

Yes, he said himself, “It is a terrible piece, and I don’t know how people
can stand it.” Furchtbar was the word, I think.

Musical life has changed a great deal in that respect. Do you

think that we have too much music now? Too ready access?
Too much of everything. There are too many books, there are too many
concerts—everything. You are always having to choose. It happens so
often that, when I have a free evening and I want to go out, there are too
many things to do. I have to stay home. That’s one of the reasons I love
to be in my place in Holland, near the sea, where I can’t go to all these
different things. On the other hand, I love to be here in London. I go to
concerts and operas, and, when I have time, to see a good play. I think it
is necessary. Still, there is this terrible feeling that there is so much. And
in that way, with a work like The Song of the Earth, it’s good to be
careful.
 151
Bernard Haitink on Mahler

With the exception of the five Riickert songs, the sections of Das
klagende Lied and of the First Symphony omitted in the standard edi¬
tions, and the movements of the Tenth Symphony completed byDeryck
Cooke, Haitink has recorded the entire corpus of Mahlers orchestral
music, all of it for Philips, and all with his own Concertgebouw Or¬
chestra. In a certain sense, this particular twenty-year association of
composer and conductor might be thought unlikely. Mahler is among
the most flamboyantly, self-indulgently emotional of composers; flam¬
boyance is the last quality likely to be suggested in person by the self-
effacing Haitink. Yet perhaps it is not so unlikely after all. The
Mahlerian outpourings are so meticulously plotted in the copiously
marked scores that they can respond just as well to a conductor who
simply does everything in his power to realize them in sound as to one
who adds a further dimension—potentially confusing— of his own
freneticism. For myself, I find both Haitink and Leonard Bernstein, in
their utterly different ways, to be profoundly satisfying Mahler inter¬
preters. But I found it illuminating to note, when Haitink’s recording of
Das Lied von der Erde was finally released late in 1976, that the tenor
soloist, James King, had here been stimulated to a much more intensely
expressive performance—by a conductor whose Mahler is sometimes
criticized for its alleged coolness —than he gave in the ten-years-older
Bernstein recording.
 Jose
Serebrier
on
Ives
RCA RECORDS RCA RECORDS
RCA RECORDS
i
During the last few months of Leopold Stokowski’s life, I made
several attempts to reach him with the idea of asking him to talk
about Ives for this book. But Marty Wargo, his agent, explained that
Stokowski—already in his middle nineties —was determined to give
no more interviews, but to devote whatever time he had left to
recording. Then, early in 1977, I received for review a new recording
of the Ives Fourth Symphony by Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Sym¬
phony Orchestra. In the course of making critical comparisons, I
became acquainted for the first time with the RCA recording made
by Jose Sere brier in 1974. I found the Sere brier performance
breathtaking in its spirit and accuracy. And recalling that Serebrier, a
gifted composer-conductor born in Uruguay in 1938, had been one of
Stokowski’s two associate conductors at the long-delayed world
premiere of the work I decided to see whether he was willing to talk
about his own experience with this phenomenally difficult piece, and
about his participation in the Stokowski performance.
Serebrier agreed, good-humoredly accepting once more the
role of understudy that his own success had by now rendered inap¬
propriate. The conversation that follows was taped in his Riverside
Drive apartment in New York at the beginning of October 1977,
diversified only occasionally by an appropriately Ivesian counterpoint
of squeaks from a revolving chair and door-knocks from Serebrier’s
baby daughter.

157
 I ’m going to talk first about Stokowski. I think it’s impor¬
tant to mention Stokowski because the first time I heard of
Ives was from Stokowski. When I was a student at the
Curtis Institute in Philadelphia —I was about seventeen—I had an ur¬
gent message from Stokowski to call him in Houston. I didn’t follow it
up because I thought it was a practical joke being played on me by one
of my friends. I was always playing jokes on them, leaving messages to
call up Arthur Judson, the manager, and so on. But the next day an¬
other message came, and finally a telegram. So I called Stokowski —it
was in November 1957 —and he said, “I cannot play the Ives Fourth
Symphony”; it had been announced as the world premiere—critics from
all over the United States were coming to hear the Fourth Symphony; it
was going to be a big occasion. He said, “The orchestra cannot play it.
May I play your symphony instead?” So I said, “Fine!” He said, “Good.
Come tomorrow with the music. I have the score, you bring the parts.”
Just like that! Well, first of all, the score existed, but there were no
parts. So the entire student body, many of whom are now very famous
artists, sat up all night helping me copy the parts so that I could take the
9 a.m. flight to Houston.

How did he know of your symphony?

This is what, to this day, I don’t know, except that it had won a BMI
Young Composers award. So my symphony took the place of the Ives
Fourth. I went down —I didn’t even have enough money for the trip,
Mrs. Curtis had to buy my plane ticket—and that’s when I became
curious about Ives. The critics were curious, too, about what had
replaced the Ives, and as they were all there, they stayed for the per¬
formance. Time and Newsweek were there. I only had two rehearsals,
and he did a fantastic performance of my First Symphony. But prac¬
tically nothing came out in the press—the concert coincided with the
first Sputnik, so there were no music reviews! I looked then at the score

159
 160
Conductors on Conducting

of the Ives Fourth, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, so I just put it
aside. My next encounter with the score was when I was already work¬
ing with Stokowski as his associate conductor with the American Sym¬
phony Orchestra in New York City.

Which started about 1962?

Yes, the fall of 1962. And in the fall of 1963 Stokowski said, “Now I’m
going to tr>r for the third time” — the episode in Houston was already the
second aborted premiere of the Ives Fourth. Frankly, what had happen¬
ed was that the Houston orchestra couldn’t get past the fourth or fifth
bar, they just couldn’t play it. So Stokowski sent all the material back to
the Fleischer Collection in Philadelphia with the request that they make
it clear—not simplify, but clarify it. The score was very confused. This
had been in 1957. Anyway, in my first year with Stokowski at the
American Symphony Orchestra he never mentioned the Ives Fourth. He
conducted my Elegy for Strings, and he did two other works of mine.
Then, in 1964, he got a big grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to
rehearse only the Ives Fourth for a month and a half or two months.

You had not been working on Ives in any way in the intervening
time?
No. Then I said to Stokowski: “I hear on the grapevine that the work re¬
quires more than one conductor. Would you be needing me? Would
you be wanting me to begin to study the score?” “No, not necessary. I
don’t believe in these gimmicks. I think we’ll do it with just the one con¬
ductor.” In fact, I remember, when I saw the score in Houston, what
struck me was that it very clearly said “four conductors,” and Ives wrote
it with four conductors in mind. That’s in the manuscript—conductor 1,
conductor 11, conductor ill, and conductor iv, all over the score.

Those things one sees in the big, blue-bound AMP printed edi¬
tion, about conductor 1, conductor n, and so on—they are Ives’s
own markings?
Yes. Originally it was for four conductors, which added to the confu¬
sion. Stokowski said, “It’s too many conductors, it’s too complicated.”
So when he asked the Fleischer Collection to clarify the material, they
helped by taking out conductor iv and splitting his contribution among
conductors 1, 11, and hi. But Stokowski still didn’t believe it should be
done with more than one conductor. You know, now it’s so common,
but at that time it was still sort of strange, even for him. He told me,
 161
Jose Serebrier on Ives

“No, don’t bother, I will do it myself,” so I never had a chance to look at

the new Fleischer score. In fact, the first time I saw the score for this per¬
formance was the historic day of the first rehearsal of the Ives Fourth in
Carnegie Hall.
In typical Stokowski fashion he invited the press. Harold
Schonberg of The New York Times and about eight or ten other critics
were there. Virgil Thomson was not a critic any more, but he was there.
Leonard Bernstein had been invited, but he couldn’t come. And there
were about a dozen musicologists and Ives experts. For the first few
minutes Stokowski stood on the podium staring at the score. Nothing
was happening. He looked at the orchestra, he looked at the score.
Then, unfortunately, he saw me walking by in the wings. “Ah,
maestro,” he said —you know, he always called his associates
“maestro” as a way of not having to remember our names —“please
come over.” I walked over. “Please conduct this last movement” —he
was starting the rehearsal with the last movement—“I want to hear it.”
At which point my heart fell; I had never even read it! So that was really
my first look at the score—my first exposure to the score was to conduct
that last movement before an audience of critics and musicologists! It’s
incredible, you know, that last movement. You have to open it
sideways because it’s so big. It was a huge thing—Stokowski had two
music stands fixed together to hold the version he used. I could hardly
see the score, much less take in the tempo changes and so on. Somehow
we got through it from beginning to end, I don’t know how, but we got
through it. To this day, it was the most difficult moment of my life.
Afterwards I told him, “You know, I was sight reading!” And
he said, “Oh, so was the orchestra.” So he got to hear it—it broke the
ice, so to speak — and then he said, “All right, now we start work,” and
he went back to the first movement. He didn’t touch the last movement
for about two weeks.
The way he proceeded to rehearse —and this is why it didn’t
work and why it took so long—was to take one bar at a time. He said,
“Let’s play the first bar.” Stop, think. “I will think.” “Let’s play it again.”
“And again.” And then on to the second bar—play it, play it again, play
two bars together. You would do it that way perhaps if you were prac¬
ticing the piano and you encountered a very difficult work, but with the
Ives Fourth, that way took forever.

This was not his common method of working?

No, never. In fact, Stokowski had the most fantastic rehearsal tech-
 162
Conductors on Conducting

nique. This is nothing to do with music making, but the rehearsal

technique of Stokowski was the most businesslike and most practical,
and made the best use of time. But he had such bad experiences with the
Ives Fourth, he was terrified. And it’s incredible, I don’t know how old
he was then —eighty-three or eighty-four—but he still wanted to do it!
Nobody else did it, and at his age he took the trouble to learn this work.
And despite the fact that I feel he let many things go by, and I think my
performance is far superior to his—I can say that because I know it is—I
think one must give credit to the old man to have done this first per¬
formance, and, you know, really to have discovered quite a bit of the
work’s character. Not the second movement, perhaps, but the fourth
movement and the first are beautiful. With his second movement, well,
I totally disagree.
By doing it the way he did, he didn’t really go deeply into the
piece or find the problems. It did get better as the orchestra played each
bar over and over. But it frustrated the musicians no end. So at the end
of the first week the musicians were fed up; they were very, very tired of
rehearsing with this system. Now, I didn’t get involved with the score,
because all through the first weeks of rehearsal Stokowski still felt that it
should be done by one conductor. In fact, I just attended the rehearsals,
but it was like listening to Chinese being spoken —I didn’t understand
anything that was happening on the stage.
Stokowski eventually realized that the score, the way it was
prepared by the Fleischer Collection, definitely required three con¬
ductors. So he then asked me to look at the score and decide how much
I wanted to do of conductor n and how much of it could be done by the
first conductor. From then on he began to rely more and more on my
help and advice on preparing this thing. I could see why it didn’t work in
Houston. They were working a bar at a time until they knew it
sideways, but they would go back a week later and it was new all over
again. The main problem —I found this out later when I did it on my
own — was that he could have rehearsed it for three years that way and it
wouldn’t have helped, because of the complicated rhythms, with so
many parts doing something different from everybody else, unless the
musicians can hear what the others are doing they simply cannot coor¬
dinate it. But I didn’t know this yet. I just simply began to help him by
correcting wrong notes and discovering problems in the score. It
became a two-conductor piece, because the third conductor was rele¬
gated to doing only the percussion ostinato in the final movement, and
to this day the Ives Fourth has been done that way.
 163
Jose Serebrier on Ives

The changes I made were necessary because the Fleischer Col¬

lection had left the symphony in a form that was still almost impossible
to conduct. If conductors n and hi did what’s in the score, it would be
impossible unless they had computer minds to synchronize 3/8 against
2/8 against 4/8 and then 6/4. In the second movement the musicians
are asked to play two bars following one conductor, three bars follow¬
ing another, and the conductors have to do the same thing, conduct the
violins for two bars, then switch to the oboes, then switch to the
flutes—it’s utterly impractical.

You say if it’s done the Fleischer Collection way it’s impossible,
and you say you divided it the way it’s now done. Which of those
ways is the one in the AMP printed score?
The printed score is a combination of the Fleischer Collection version
and my simplification. The orchestral material that most people use has
my division.

So, in other words, the printed score is a sort of halfway house

between what you originally got from Fleischer and what is ac¬
tually in the orchestral parts.
Sure. The parts that are used now are a third form, which is the one I
edited. The score was already printed by then, so it couldn’t be put into
that. There is still another version, the Gunther Schuller version, which
we’ll talk about later. In any case, if you look at the printed score you
will see that it is really quite impractical. For the premiere, what hap¬
pened in the end was that I gave myself very little of the actual conduc¬
ting to do. Stokowski wanted to conduct most of it, and he was right in
thinking, from the beginning, that the fewer the conductors and the less
the division of conducting duties in the work, the better the perform¬
ance would be. Following that principle, he did most of the task, and I
conducted only when there was absolutely no choice but to have a
second conductor.
Really, then, it’s a two-conductor piece. The third conductor
came in because I felt it was necessary for the orchestra’s other associate
conductor to do something too. We decided that he could conduct the
percussion in the last movement, an ostinato almost completely
separate from what the rest of the orchestra is doing; but conductor 11,
who has nothing to do in the last movement, could have done it simply
by walking offstage. Some of the places where it is utterly impossible to
do it with less than two conductors are in the second movement. One is
 164
Conductors on Conducting

the so-called “collapse” section—Stokowski used to joke and call it the

“calypse.” When I did it with him he said, “You’re a wonderful col-
lapser, or should I say ‘calypser’?” This section is in the middle of the
second movement, one of the most imaginative passages in the work,
where the strings and some percussion remain soft and slow and almost
static, and then are suddenly interrupted by the second orchestra. Ideal¬
ly, in Ives’s vision, there should have been an entirely separate second
orchestra in a different part of the hall. It has never been played that
way—it’s so expensive to have a second orchestra —but the effect was
achieved in the quadraphonic version of my recording. In actual per¬
formance it’s only practical to have everyone on the stage. Ives was very
impractical, but not completely so. He didn’t score it for a full second
orchestra. What he did was divide the orchestra into two separate
halves. So half the orchestra continues in this monotone while it’s inter¬
rupted by the other half. The orchestra that has the monotone has to be
conducted at a very slow three or subdivided six. The other orchestra
comes in at a completely different speed, different meter, and in fact
goes accelerando—it goes faster and faster. And then when the second
orchestra stops, the first orchestra is still playing in the old slow
monotone. You cannot do without two conductors here. Even Boulez,
who prides himself on conducting some Ives—he does Central Park in
the Dark with one conductor by beating different rhythms with both
hands, and successfully so —even he could not do the Ives Fourth by
himself, he had to have an assistant conductor in the second movement.

Presumably because it’s one thing to conduct two steady rhythms

with two hands, but to conduct one steady rhythm and one ac¬
celerando rhythm with two hands is beyond anyone.
Yes. Now, in the world premiere performance I conducted a few bars in
the first movement, but I’ve since clarified them—it’s not necessary to
have a second conductor for this movement. The second conductor
conducts mostly in the second movement. Sometimes the violas, some¬
times the second violins, sometimes the brass have a rhythm which is so
different from the rest of the orchestra that it requires a second conduc¬
tor—especially in the “collapse” section I referred to, and in two other
sections in the second movement where again the rhythms are quite
different. But the “collapse” is the only section where really there is no
coordination between the two parts, one just hopes that they will end
more or less where they’re supposed to.
Eventually, after two months of rehearsing, the Ives Fourth
 165
Jose Serebrier on Ives

had a very brilliant performance — the world premiere, as you remem¬

ber, was a tremendous success. But then nothing had been rehearsed so
long. Even The Rite of Spring didn’t get so many rehearsals for its
premiere. In fact, Monteux told me he only had nine rehearsals. That
was part of the reason it was a fiasco —it wasn’t well played, nine re¬
hearsals weren’t enough. But something happens to these difficult
works. As they go from one city to another, the second performance be¬
comes easier.

I was going to ask you precisely this. It’s a curious metaphysical

experience that I’ve had. I’ve had it with a work that’s not actual¬
ly all that difficult: Wilfred Josephs’s Requiem has been per¬
formed perhaps a dozen times in different places, and each time
it has been much easier to do. How do you explain this?
There are some practical reasons why it becomes easier. The parts, after
each performance, become more marked, and hopefully they have
fingerings, bowings, and mistakes have been corrected each time.
Perhaps there is a tape of the first performance that may help the con¬
ductor. If a work has been heard, you know what it’s supposed to
sound like. The Rite of Spring, for example, is not a mystery any more.
Even an orchestra that has never played it knows how it sounds —they
hear it in their minds. But there is also an element of mystery in the way
it becomes easier. The best example is the American Symphony Or¬
chestra itself. When we repeated the Ives Fourth the following season it
wasn’t the same orchestra —Stokowski changed many of the players
each year, there was a turnover of about forty percent—yet the next
time around the work was prepared in the usual four rehearsals, and it
was as good a performance.
Over those two years I learned a great deal about Ives, and
frankly I wasn’t that impressed. I was impressed with the imagination,
but not nearly as much as I was later on. I know Stokowski admired
Ives enormously, both because of the great imagination of the man, and
for his principles and ideas, and he really wanted to do justice to the
work. He understood the universality of Ives, he understood the drama,
he understood the technical aspects up to a point. But he missed the
humor, which is one of Ives’s most important elements. Few composers
in history have had the humor of Ives, and I’m sorry to say that that was
lost. Stokowski had a humor, quite a bit of dry British humor, of his
own, but he did not have it in making music. Making music was a
solemn experience.
 166
Conductors on Conducting

It was still the nineteenth-century divine experience.

Yes, absolutely, so he never understood the humor of Ives, which is so
irreverent. But he understood very well the so-called religious experi¬
ence of the fourth movement, and especially the organ-like quality of
the third movement. In fact, Stokowski established a pattern of how to
perform the third movement which I followed in my own way in my
own version. This is perhaps the only aspect in which I was influenced
by Stokowski’s performance. The Ives experts, by the way, do not en¬
tirely agree with us, because they feel both Stokowski and I do it too
slowly and too solemnly, and they feel that the ending especially, with
the quotations from hymns and so on, should be humorous and not
pompous. They have a point, yet we have a point too, because Ives did
not indicate anything. Incidentally, I do it even slower than Stokowski.
I don’t think it’s so humorous, at least it doesn’t sound humorous, this
third movement.
At that time, as I said, I wasn’t in love yet with Ives. I didn’t
even own a score of the Fourth Symphony after those performances—
my score went back to the Fleischer Collection. But I became interested
in other Ives works. I began to do The Unanswered Question, which is
an incredible piece —I did that all over the world. And I specialized
mostly in Decoration Day, from the Holidays Symphony, which I still
think is Ives’s best piece. Decoration Day is the most concise, it’s the
whole Ivesian world in nine minutes, it’s the best-written piece. And I’m
proven sort of right by the fact that it’s the most performed of his works.
The Chicago Symphony took it on a European tour and to Japan, the
Cleveland Orchestra took it to South America —it’s a practical piece,
that’s part of the thing, and a very successful one. Then I did once or
twice the complete Holidays Symphony, and I’ve accompanied some of
his songs. I think the songs are fantastic, among the greatest Ives things:
Each song is a world, so imaginative, and their humor is just marvelous.
But my appreciation of the Fourth Symphony came slowly. It escaped
me for years. I didn’t understand it at the time of the premiere. After the
premiere, you know, we made a videotape for National Educational
Television and we made a record for Columbia. And then, in the
following two years, we repeated the Ives Fourth.

But it still hadn’t really gotten to you.

No. Speaking as a very young composer myself, I had no doubts about
Ives’s imagination and his formidable ideas, but I was disgusted by the
complete lack of neatness (as against Ravel, let’s say), and by the im-
 167
Jose Serebrier on Ives

practicality of the writing, which made it so difficult and unplayable at

times, and by the complete lack of stylistic unity, especially in the
Fourth Symphony.

Between, say, the second and third movements most extremely.

Extremely—feeling that they were like two works that really didn’t go
together. I in fact suspected that the work was never meant as a sym¬
phony; at the time I suspected that really he just pasted four movements
together, because they are such different worlds. The prelude is so
short—it’s three minutes, and it’s almost like an introduction—and I
really saw the second movement as a work that could stand by itself.

Which of course it does in part as The Celestial Railroad, in the

form of a piano piece.
Yes, but it could never really be played by itself, the second movement
of that symphony. In the Holidays Symphony you can play the move¬
ments separately, but not in the Fourth Symphony. Only the third
movement of the Fourth is in fact published separately, as a piece that
could be played by itself, but not the second, which I think is the most
exciting for me. And I felt the third movement didn’t belong, and the
fourth I was very impressed by but I didn’t quite figure it out—again it
was a different style—and somehow I felt the whole thing didn’t add up.
So I wasn’t interested in it, and I didn’t see any practical way of playing
it anywhere, so that was that.
Years later, as it happened, when I was planning to do my re¬
cording, I was in London and I heard about a performance of the Fourth
Symphony that John Pritchard was conducting in Manchester with
the Halle Orchestra. I went there, and I was very impressed, because
he was the first conductor, I thought, that followed the tempo changes
that Ives indicated, and by doing so he suddenly revealed the work to
me much better than before. He’s done the Ives Fourth quite a few
times. He also used a second conductor—in fact, he gave the second
conductor the main podium: Pritchard, in a great show of modesty,
stood at the side on a smaller podium, and the second conductor only
conducted a few times, but he had the main podium. I didn’t under¬
stand why he did it like that. But Pritchard said to me, “I understand
you’re going to record this work—you’re going to have lots of trouble.”
He asked me, “What do you think of this piece?”, and I said, “I’m still
wondering about it.” Then he must have read my mind, because he
said, “I wonder if one could ever do it skipping the third movement.”
 168
Conductors on Conducting

We were of one spirit regarding the third movement. We liked it as a

separate piece, but not necessarily as part of the whole symphony. This
happens with other works of Ives, you know — in the string quartets and
the piano sonatas you have this problem. But eventually I realized that
the third movement must be there, and you could not do it without,
that you need the calm of the third movement. And it happens in per¬
formance. You do the second movement—the audience, if they’re a bit
sophisticated, laugh, always, at the end of the second movement. It’s so
funny, this ending — the “collapse” section, and then the ending with the
violas left hanging out. They always think, “Oh, it’s a big joke.” And
the third movement has a strange tonic effect of calming everybody’s
nerves down. I can’t think of anything but this third movement now
that will work as well as it does, after that second movement ending, as
a complete tonal wash of one’s ears.

Is it true to say that, if one thought of it as a three-movement

piece, one-two-four, it would be on too intense a level of intel¬
lectual concentration?
Yes, it wouldn’t work.

And you have to have a bit o/reculer — a moment of just taking a

bit of music easily.
That’s right. Now, why not do it in the same style becomes the ques¬
tion. Stravinsky would never have done anything like that. But this is
Ives, and that’s the way he solved his problem, and it works. In fact, he
borrowed from the Concord Piano Sonata for the second movement,
and the third movement comes from the First String Quartet. As far as I
know, the fourth movement, most of it, is original for the symphony.
But he was constantly doing this pasting together.

The first movement is a song, isn’t it?

That’s right. But somehow it all works together, and it does fit as a sym¬
phony, and by now it’s almost considered a classic. I learned to accept
the stylistic anomalies and to make the best of them. I realized that Ives
couldn’t care less about stylistic unity, just as he couldn’t care less about
harmonic continuity and all the stipulations about form and orches¬
tration, the notions of which he completely revised. He was not tied up
by performance problems because he did not expect performances. He
had the unique situation of not being a professional composer writing
for a public. He could write as he pleased, for himself, in an abstract
 169
Jose Serebrier on Ives

world. So he cannot be analyzed with the same strictness with which we

would analyze Beethoven or Stravinsky, who wrote for a public, or
even Schoenberg, who wrote for an advanced public. This is the first
consideration in Ives: That he wrote in a sort of vacuum, and could thus
permit himself flights of the imagination which are almost incredible to
this day. He could permit himself to write rhythms so difficult they are
almost impossible to play, though by now we have learned to live with
them, almost to master them. One simply has to understand that this is
the way Ives worked. In other words, I didn’t learn to live with it other
than to accept it, because it’s Ives. America has made a hero of Ives.
Everything by Ives is great—because there are so few great composers
here, there’s a tendency to idolize.
The stylistic problems found especially in the Fourth Sym¬
phony are, incidentally, not encountered so much in Ives’s earlier
works. You have to look at them to know how well schooled he was.

The First Symphony ?

The First Symphony, and even a work like The Celestial Country, a big
cantata that was his last student piece. It is not a great work, but it is a
beautifully written work, with perfect modulations, and in fact already
some touches of Ivesian imagination in it. You can see that this compos¬
er might come through. But it’s very classical. In a way you can almost
say the same thing of Cage. Have you ever seen any of Cage’s earlier,
student works? Perfectly tonal; it’s quite extraordinary. You know that
Cage studied with Arnold Schoenberg. I’m not talking in the defense of
Cage, but it’s interesting, because some modern composers that I know,
and in fact some young composers today who are quite successful, have
never bothered to study harmony, fugue, and counterpoint. What for?
If you intend to do aleatoric music, and music that doesn’t even employ
notes, they feel it’s nonsense to go through the years of tying oneself
down to the tradition of classical writing.

Whereas, as Stravinsky knew, you can only break the rules when
you know them.
Exactly. I feel that that’s absolutely necessary. Anyway, we know Ives
knew the rules. But as he knew the rules, he learned to break them one
by one. What challenges me most, as a composer and a conductor, is
the use of form; and the most fantastic thing stylistically about Ives is
that no two Ives works that I know employ the same form. Ives’s form is
so elusive, it’s incredible.
 170
Conductors on Conducting

It’s very interesting that you say that, because it’s possible to have
a superficial impression from, say, the movements of the Holi¬
days Symphony that there is a formal similarity—the slow build¬
up, the big climax, then the breaking off for a brief conclusion.
Yes, you can say that’s in principle an A-B-A idea—it is soft and slow,
fast and loud, soft and slow —but really not at all. It doesn’t add up to a
form, because harmonically and thematically there’s no relation be¬
tween the first and the final section. Now, I dare anyone to try and
describe the form of any of the movements of the Fourth Symphony.
The only way you can describe it is as improvisatory form. It all hangs
together—but in a concept that is unique to Ives. The second move¬
ment, for example, is based on the idea of interruptions: He presents a
theme and interrupts it, and that’s the central concept. He tries to sur¬
prise all the time. As for the rhythms, unlike Pacific 231, where Honeg¬
ger has worked out the idea of a train getting faster and faster and then
slowing down and coming to a stop, Ives, in the similar portions of the
second movement, has worked out his rhythms mathematically. If one
follows the direction, which is so cleverly done and so clear in the score,
the effect is marvelous, of a speeding-up like a train, though he may not
have thought of a train. It’s a wonderful effect. Ives worked many other
things out very cleverly, and if one accepts the idea that he didn’t care
about consistency of style, then obviously one can live with the different
styles that go into the piece.

It’s not actually that much more extreme than, say, the stylistic
disunity between the first and second movements of Mahler’s
Second Symphony. When you go into that minuet after the
incredibly wide-ranging first movement, this is like a jump into a
different world.
Absolutely. I’m glad you mention that because there are some parallels
between Mahler and Ives, as strange as it seems. You know that it’s pre¬
sumed that they met, at Ives’s copyists, and it’s further presumed that
Mahler was impressed with the score of the Ives Second Symphony and
the Holidays Symphony, and it is presumed that Mahler took one of
these two works with him to Vienna, and further that he may have
played one of these two works at one of the Sunday afternoon concerts
for which programs were not kept, unfortunately, at that time. This is a
bit imaginative, but if you talk to any of the Ives experts they will tell
you about this. And there may well have been some influence of Ives on
Mahler.
 171
Jose Serebrier on Ives

There is also the same phenomenon quite early in Mahler of tem¬

pos that don’t entirely coalesce, one group starting in a new
tempo before the other has finished.
Yes, you have it in the First Symphony—the Jewish danceband mixing
with the other music.

Also the Mahler Third Symphony, that passage with the birdsong
coming in at a different tempo from the rest of the orchestra, and
the Fourth Symphony again —though these are all presumably
too early to have been influenced that way.
Yes. That’s just a conjecture, because it is known that Mahler visited
the copyist that was working for Ives—that is a known fact—so it is
quite possible that he may have seen the scores. We know that Schoen¬
berg was acquainted with Ives’s music—you know the famous quote.

“There is a great man living in this country [the United States]—

a composer. He has solved the problem of how to preserve one’s
self and to learn. He responds to negligence by contempt. He is
not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Ives.”
So he was not unknown to some of the major composers of his time.
They probably thought of him as some strange phenomenon. But it
took forever for his music to become known, and in fact no publisher
wanted his music. It was only Peer—Southern Music, really, the other
half of Peer—that sort of accepted his music, and it proved to be an in¬
credible wisdom on their part.

Speaking of accepting his music, how did you come to record the
Ives Fourth Symphony eventually?
In fact, it wasn’t my idea to come back to the Fourth Symphony. It was
RCA’s. RCA knew the Ives centenary was coming up, and Peter Mun-
vies, then the head of the Artists and Repertoire Department, thought
they should do something—he had been at Columbia when they did the
world premiere recording, so he remembered the success. It was a best¬
seller. Ives was already beginning to acquire a name in the American
musical world when Stokowski made the record, but that’s what did it,
the Fourth Symphony, and the recording was selling in supermarkets!
And it sold 38,000 copies, which in America for a record of serious
music is incredible, of modern music especially. In fact, Columbia had
been so afraid to record the Ives Fourth that they wouldn’t do it. Sto¬
kowski had to find funding for it. The Samuel Rubin Foundation paid
 172
Conductors on Conducting

for the recording. Peter Munvies remembered that experience, and he

thought the Ives Fourth needed a new recording.

This was about the early 1970s, presumably.

The actual centenary year was 1974. It was in 1973 that I had a call from
Peter Munvies’s secretary.

You hadn’t made any records for RCA at that point?

No, my only recording experience had been for labels like Desto and
CRI, and the only work of my own on records at that time was my Par¬
tita on Louisville. The RCA Ives Fourth was my first important record.
Peter Munvies called saying he wanted to make a new recording because
the Stokowski was already eight years old. I didn’t think I liked the idea.
I wanted to meet him because I was hoping to convince him to record
something else in its place. I proposed Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Sym¬
phony, which I am still anxious to record. And he said, “Fine, we might
do Manfred if you record the Ives Fourth.” I said, “But I don’t think I
can do it, because the Stokowski record was so great—how am I going
to do it?” He said, “Listen to the record—we’ll send you a record and a
score—and then let us know what you think.” And that’s what I did. I
listened to that record — which I had never heard, by the way—I listened
to the record with the score over and over, a whole day, twenty times,
and I couldn’t believe it. In the second movement, all the tempo changes
which are the key to the movement, and which are so well worked out
by Ives for the effect he wanted—Stokowski just went through them,
missed them altogether.

Not to the degree that Ozawa does.

Oh, yes, that’s something else. In Stokowski’s recording there were
some things that I felt would be difficult to emulate—the first move¬
ment, which he does beautifully, and the third movement, which im¬
pressed me, and the understanding of the fourth. But because of the
second movement I immediately called Peter and said, “Absolutely, I
feel I can do some of it at least as well.” I wanted to choose the orchestra
itself. He said, “Only if it’s a European orchestra”—they couldn’t afford
to do it in America—and he also said “No” when I asked for a month of
rehearsals. So I said, “Right, but I don’t want to make a contract until I
go to London.” I was actually in London a month later, conducting the
New Philharmonia in the British premiere of Bloch’s opera Macbeth, in
 173
Jose Serebrier on Ives

a concert version. I met with Eric Bravington, the Managing Director of

the London Philharmonic Orchestra; I told him about the RCA project,
and that my first choice would be the London Philharmonic, because it
was already becoming one of the best orchestras in London. I was also
considering the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, who wanted very badly
to do it—I had worked with the other London orchestras, but not the
Royal Philharmonic. At that point, most of the London orchestras were
lobbying to do it, because they knew that it would be an important rec¬
ord, for the American market anyway. But what clinched it for the Lon¬
don Philharmonic was Bravington’s artistic involvement. He felt it was
a very important project. I told him that all RCA could afford was five
recording sessions. There was no time to have a performance before¬
hand, which would have helped the recording, because the season was
all mapped out, and once RCA decided to do it, it was a matter of a
month or six weeks—we must do it now—because Peter Munvies worked
that way—to come out in time for the Ives centenary project. So Brav¬
ington had this idea —it was his idea —that he could not provide a per¬
formance to make the recording more efficient, but he could give a gift
to RCA of one rehearsal. One more rehearsal, I felt, would do noth¬
ing, because I needed two months. What would help would be to use it
to rehearse sections of the orchestra individually, and this is what we
did. It was a very eccentric request, and very few managers, unless
they have the vision of Bravington, will agree to such a thing—to give
a free rehearsal in order to have a recording done correctly, but then to
have that rehearsal broken up in thirty groups! It means that the or¬
chestra lost a week of work practically, because there was always a
group missing. But for the LPO Ltd. it only cost one rehearsal, because
each group was only working three hours—though they also paid for
the rehearsal hall. And so that they wouldn’t lose a whole month, I
rehearsed every day from nine to midnight. I can’t remember the exact
order, but I divided them in this fashion: first violins, three hours; sec¬
ond violins, three hours; violas, three hours; cellos alone, three hours;
basses alone, three hours; flutes alone, three hours; the solo violins
that play in the first and last movements, three hours; harps; the three
pianists (who have impossible parts), three hours; the solo pi¬
anist—that was cheaper, I met with him several times for an hour at a
time, it did wonders; organ, three hours by himself; celesta —such a
difficult part—three hours; brass divided into groups, three hours;
percussion divided into groups, three hours; and on and on. I never
 174
Conductors on Conducting

worked so hard. Since then I’ve done similar things, but it was my first
such experience of working from nine to midnight. So it was all done,
and it was quite a bit of logistics—letters were going back and forth
telling people where the rehearsals were to be held because they could
not all be in the same place. Sometimes I had half an hour in between to
get from one to another.

The idea of this presumably being to get the sound of the whole
part into the players’ ears, so that they could then concentrate
on hearing the other people.
Exactly. I felt that the system of rehearsing one bar at a time didn’t
work, because the orchestra couldn’t hear anything of what was hap¬
pening. My idea was that they should at least be able to hear themselves,
and thus get each part clear.

Parenthetically, is the sectional rehearsal technique something

you only do in Ives?
Let’s see, I use sectional rehearsals when I do some very difficult works,
like the Manfred Symphony—not to that extent, but I ask for a wind
rehearsal and a string rehearsal, which helps enormously, because it’s
rhythmically very difficult too; and for The Rite of Spring, and even
for the Second Suite of Daphnis. But Ives, I think, cannot be played
any other way.
All this, though, was only the finishing touches to the prepa¬
ration. Before that there was the incredible problem of the orchestral
parts. I had Schirmer send me two sets of parts —I was inundated with
parts. There were about five sets, and I wanted to see two of them: the
parts Stokowski used, and the Gunther Schuller set (he called it the
Gunther Schuller Version), which he had arranged for one conductor.
For the past two or three years Schuller had been doing it without the
aid of other conductors, and he had fixed a set of parts. I looked at this
set first because I thought it might be fun to do it on my own. Then I
realized what he had done: He rearranged the rhythms Ives wrote that
require two conductors in such a way that the players would only have
to follow one, but in doing so —for the privilege of having only one
conductor—he made it a hundred times more difficult for the players,
so what’s the point? For example, there are parts where the players
have a triplet over two bars—three bars have to sound as long as two —
and with two conductors it works, because the conductor concerned
bothers to beat it faster than regular bars in order to fit it within the
 175
Jose Serebrier on Ives

framework. Schuller rewrote it so that it will fit in two bars, and wrote
it beautifully...

By changing the note values...

... to a point where the player will have to have a computer next to him
as he plays it.

In a sense it’s the reverse process of Stravinsky’s later simplifica¬

tion of the rhythms in The Rite of Spring.
Exactly. So I felt, this is absolutely not doing justice to the work, it’s
making it more difficult. And I think part of the problem with the Ozawa
recording—I’m almost sure—is that he uses the Schuller version. And
in spite of the fact that the Boston Symphony Orchestra has played it
any number of times — they toured Europe with it, he’s done it in New
York and all over—part of the problem is that they haven’t done the
extensive sectional rehearsals that clarify the score.
So I discarded the Schuller version and began to look into the
Stokowski parts —they’re not Stokowski’s personal set of parts, they
are the parts that he used. I couldn’t believe my eyes. First of all, the
players had been so bored, they had scribbled things all over the parts.
I found that there were pages upon pages without any dynamic mark¬
ings in the parts —in the brass, in the winds. I think the Fleischer Col¬
lection had done a marvelous job, but many, many mistakes had gone
by, an enormous amount of mistakes —wrong notes, missing dynam¬
ics. Sometimes Ives wrote wrong notes, I know, on purpose.
Some people who know that I’ve corrected so many mistakes
in the Fourth Symphony, and also in Decoration Day, have asked me:
“How do you know which are wrong notes, and which are meant
wrong notes?” It’s important to try to clarify this. When I revised the
parts, some were obviously wrong notes. Sometimes I found a whole
page in the cellos where the notes were correct, but the clef was wrong:
They had left a bass clef, and it was supposed to be tenor clef — slight
mistake! When a whole page is in the wrong clef, there’s no question
about it. Other times we know there are wrong notes when the whole
section is playing in unison —all the violas and cellos and basses, for
example, with one note different in the violas —it’s quite simple, it’s no
mystery. And, in fact, someone on the West Coast is writing a whole
errata book on the Ives Fourth Symphony — a musicologist working at
UCFA. I sent him my list of errors and he found a few others from that
edition.
 176
Conductors on Conducting

But then there are the other sorts of wrong notes, the ones that
have a humorous effect or the ones that...
Oh, that’s something else, because they’re obvious. It was quite simple
for me to find which were mistakes.

One wouldn't correct the last chord of the Second Symphony, for
example.
No! That’s a good example of it. But then there are cases that were ob¬
viously copyists’ mistakes. I couldn’t believe that so many things were
wrong. So I called Peter Munvies and said, “Look, this is going to take
me months of work, we cannot possibly do the recording next month.”
So we postponed the recording for six months. I worked hours and
hours every day to fix them. And then I cleaned them and put bowings
in—there were no bowings in the parts—I edited them. I felt that part
of the problem in playing Ives is the tendency to play him literally, as
written, the way one might play, let’s say, Handel —where there are no
dynamic markings most of the time, and there are no crescendos or di¬
minuendos, and there are definitely no expression marks. Does that
mean we should play Bach and Handel without any expression, and
only with the Baroque forte-piano type of balance, and no mezzo-
fortes, no echo effects, because they didn’t bother to indicate them
most of the time? I won’t go into the question of how you play Bach
and Handel, but I will go into the question of how to play Ives. I don’t
think he intended his music to be played without expression. I did not
edit it to the extent that Beecham would have edited it had he gotten
hold of the score, but I did use some of the Beecham-type ideas, which
I admired, feeling that the music could come more to life if the con¬
ductor or the performer would read into it to find the contour of the
melodies, of the lines, and bring them forth. Much of my work with
the Fourth Symphony, then (and I’ve since done the same thing with
Decoration Day and some of the chamber music), was doing what Ives
never bothered to do, which is to add these editorial performance effects
— crescendos, diminuendos, some balances. I think the reason he
didn’t bother with this was that he didn’t expect performances. Getting
his music down on paper was enough for him. If he had had perform¬
ances, quite possibly he would have bothered, for example, to con¬
sider how many notes a violin can play in one bow before it has to
change direction. But as it was, when he did write slurs for the strings,
he just wrote them as expression marks, which run over for about
eight bars. Now Mahler, in his symphonies, also wrote slurs that go
for twelve bars at times for the violin, but then below that he very
 Ill
Jose Serebrier on Ives

clearly indicated, sometimes, where the bow should change. Mahler, as

you know, is inundated with expression marks from bar to bar, some¬
times three different expression marks for one note. He did it because
he was a conductor. He knew how much this editing helped a perform¬
ance. Much of it must have come out of performances, and it helps. But
Ives didn’t have the experience of performances, and this is part of the
problem. And if he’s played literally, without expression marks because
he didn’t put them in, and without the sectional rehearsals that would
clarify each part, then the result is an undifferentiated mass of sound,
and people think this is the way Ives is supposed to sound.
The reason my recorded performance sounds so clear is that I
took the trouble to put bowings in, and to clarify it. I did not simplify it.
I did help the players to this extent, that whenever they had some very
complicated rhythms, I put lines on top showing where the beat falls.
And I put dynamics in, many of which were missing from the parts, and
added dynamics of my own to balance the piece. In parts of the second
and fourth movements, for example, he has everyone playing every
note in the scale, and more, and in all kinds of rhythms, and the result is
you don’t understand a thing. I don’t think Ives meant that. I think he
would have wanted at least half of it to come out in the foreground. So
I helped a little bit with the dynamics, the way one does with a
Beethoven symphony, or even a Brahms or Bruckner symphony,
where everything is marked forte in the score, or everything is marked
piano, but if you do it that way it will never come out right—a brass
instrument is louder than a flute.

Piano means a different thing when it’s written for a trumpet...

That’s right. Now I had never conducted the piece on my own, as op¬
posed to being second conductor, before the recording. A week before
the recording I was engaged to conduct a concert in Poland, with the
best Polish orchestra, the Katowice Radio-Television Philharmonic,
and I had this sudden idea that I might suggest replacing The Rite of
Spring on the program with the Ives Fourth. And they fortunately
agreed.

They presumably didn’t know what they were letting themselves

in for.
They didn’t. I was in Germany when I cabled them —I was conducting,
of all things, Traviata, at the Cologne Opera —and I was spending
every free minute on the Ives parts. I remember I had a deadline for
sending them by plane to London —I wanted the London Philhar-
 178
Conductors on Conducting

monic to have them a week before rehearsals started so the musicians

could study them. My whole room in the apartment in Cologne was filled
with parts —I was working on the harp parts to the very last minute, I
barely made the plane.
It meant that I couldn’t use the LPO set of parts in Poland. In
Poland I had to use an uncorrected set of parts, and the set arrived
without the piano parts, which are so difficult. So I telephoned New
York to get the piano parts, but some orchestra that had played it be¬
fore hadn’t returned them. So the librarians in Poland stayed up all
night and, from the score, copied these piano parts, which are like books
— they are as thick as three Beethoven piano sonatas. I had three days
of rehearsals for the Ives Fourth, and my program was the Ives Fourth,
Brahms Violin Concerto, and Dapbnis Second Suite. But it’s a won¬
derful orchestra, and, of those three days, my first day was devoted to
sectional rehearsals. They weren’t as extensive as in London —I had to
do it all in one day with the Katowice orchestra —but it worked, and
even with an uncorrected set of parts (we fixed as many mistakes as we
could) they did wonderfully. I was very grateful for the opportunity to
have done the Ives Fourth once myself before I recorded it.
In Poland I used the assistant concertmaster to lead the “col¬
lapse” section in the second movement, and I used a local composer to
conduct the percussion in the last movement—those two cannot be done
without in a concert performance. But for the recording in London I
simply recorded it twice myself. I had a second conductor stand by, an
English composer, because I didn’t know until the recording session how
we were going to do it, and it all worked out as we were doing it. We
decided that the most important thing to do was to do a quadraphonic
version, because at that time quadraphonic records were coming into
their own. So for the quadraphonic version especially we recorded the
brass interruption orchestra separately and then it was superimposed,
and if you hear the quad version, it is ten times better than the stereo
version. Another thing we superimposed was the percussion in the last
movement. I decided to record the percussion separately and then add
it, and to this day we can’t understand how it worked. It’s a seven-
minute movement. We only made one take of it, and it worked to the
second. I could never do it again. But that’s how it was done with one
conductor — it could not be done in performance, obviously. And over
the whole piece we worked so quickly, as a result of the sectional re¬
hearsals, that we finished the recording in four sessions instead of the
five RCA had allocated.
 179
Jose Serebrier on Ives

You spoke earlier of learning “to make the best” of the work’s
shifts of style. As a conductor, preparing a performance, con¬
sidering your conception of the work, considering your interpre¬
tation of it, do you do anything special, anything specific, as a
response to this particular stylistic characteristic? You accept a
composer’s disunity of style, therefore do you enhance disunity of
style? You don’t play it down, but do you perhaps play it up in
performance?
That’s an interesting question. I have not done so. I have played it as it
is—well, I play it up, you’re perhaps right, after all. In other words, I
don’t try to make the third movement “fit” by trying to make it sound
more modern than it is. In fact, I play it as Romantic music, as it is writ¬
ten, with full emphasis on the Baroque turns. I make my strings vibrate
for all they are worth.
One other thing we did in the recording may be relevant
here. In the third movement we used a real organ. (In the Stokowski
recording he had to use a little Hammond electric organ.) And the en¬
trance of the organ, in the quadraphonic version, is spellbinding, be¬
cause it was like a church organ. Suddenly, from one speaker, you
hear the sound of the organ —it’s another interruption. And, in the
second movement, it’s the only recording that has a quartertone
piano. Neither the Stokowski nor the Ozawa used a quartertone piano.
Ives wrote very clearly that, if no quartertone piano is available, the
part should not be played at all, which makes sense. If you play it on a
standard piano the notes are different — it just makes no sense whatso¬
ever, it’s a different effect. If you listen to this section of the second
movement with Stokowski, it’s a regular piano tinkling away. I insisted
on a quartertone piano, which doesn’t exist in London, so we had a
tuner pick up a small upright Steinway and retune it, and I had to write
a special part for the pianist. And if you listen to it now, it’s a section
where the solo violin plays, and the quartertone piano is behind it, and
it’s fantastic. It’s a section about which Ives wrote. He pictured some¬
one being in a very crowded street and walking suddenly into a church,
where the organ has been playing forever, for ages, and it’s musty and
dark — and you feel that in the music, it’s really a wonderful tonal pic¬
ture. And the quartertone piano produces an effect that perhaps only
one or two people may notice, but it’s what Ives wanted. Yet this raises
the whole question of literalness.
Conductors generally pride themselves on being literal: The
more literally you follow the score, within an artistic frame, the better
 180
Conductors on Conducting

you are. Now, I feel that Ives couldn’t have cared less about artists who
try to be literal —in fact, he poked fun at them. He felt that the artist
should interpret music freely within the dictates of the score. And being
a composer myself, I know how important it is to take the composer’s
words with a grain of salt, to interpret. On the opening page of the
Fourth Symphony, Ives makes what could be construed as a joke: For
the choral part, he writes “preferably without voices.” Well, if you
have a conductor who wants to do it exactly the way the composer
wanted, what’ll he do there?
In some pieces Ives gives the conductor a choice of instruments:
in one case, saxophone or bells or piano! Can you think of three more
different instruments? How are you going to be literal? This is in From
the Steeples and the Mountains, one of his best pieces. He has a choice
of instruments to use for bells — a carillon, or a piano. Can you imagine
a piano playing in place of bells? In The Unanswered Question you
can use a choice of four flutes or a variety of other instruments. So, in a
way, much of the time he’s writing in the abstract, almost —and this
should not be a sacrilegious comparison—but almost as Bach wrote The
Art of the Fugue, which is really in the abstract. In the second move¬
ment of the Ives Fourth Symphony, again, the conductor has the op¬
tion of either a bassoon or a saxophone. Stokowski used both playing
together — he couldn’t make up his mind — and that adds to the muddi¬
ness of the movement. Since Ives gave the option, I decided that some¬
times the saxophone gives a more interesting sound for a particular
passage, sometimes the bassoon. I used both, but separately. So I helped
what Ives had in mind, because he really couldn’t make up his mind,
except in one passage where it’s specifically saxophone.

I think it’s important to be conscious how recent is the idea of

literal adherence to scores —the result of one or two artists’
work in the twentieth century, rather than a sort of law that
goes back through the nineteenth century. There is, in fact, a
paradox involved in this, because if you are faithful to the letter
of a nineteenth-century score, you can for that very reason be
unfaithful to the spirit, since the composer expected you to use
your imagination.
Yes, exactly, you’re so right. Ives was still in many ways a nineteenth-
century composer, a nineteenth-century composer gone wild. Don’t
forget that when Ives was beginning to compose his imaginative mod¬
ern works, so called, the latest composers known to him were Brahms,
 181
Jose Serebrier on Ives

Tchaikovsky—Wagner was beginning to be popular in America, this

was in the 1880s. And so, it’s even incredible that he could come up
with these fantastic, wild ideas. He was still, though, at heart, in many
ways a nineteenth-century composer. He was fighting Romanticism by
breaking with everything. In the structural sphere, this made his forms
very free, and this in turn makes his music very difficult to interpret,
because one of the ways an interpreter makes up his interpretation of a
work is by shaping the form.
This is the way I do it: I study the form of a work—after study¬
ing the harmony, the orchestration —and it gives me the speed of it, it
gives me the breadth of it, and the way I want to make an impact with
it. It gives me the way to present it. The only other composer with whom
I’ve had a similarly difficult experience with form was Delius, when I
conducted his Violin Concerto in Liverpool on a few hours’ notice
without ever having conducted a note of his before. The quickest way
to learn a score is to find the form: Identify the main entrances and de¬
velop an idea of the piece. I couldn’t figure out the form of the Delius
Violin Concerto.

There isn’t one.

Now, with Ives, I’ve tried unsuccessfully to come up with the form in
many of the works. What I’ve come up with is some idea of what went
through his mind, and in many ways I think it’s like a written-out, care¬
fully thought-out improvisation, in which ideas sometimes recur—A,
B, C do come back once in a while —but not as part of a consciously
determined, a priori form.
In this context, the first movement of the Fourth Symphony
is the closest to a simple A-B-A form, but only because, as you men¬
tioned before, it starts off softly and slowly, and it ends softly and
slowly. The third movement is more classical and can be pinned down
to some sort of a form. He calls it a fugue, but it is really not a fugue
though it has fugal entrances. It’s no more a fugue than the last section
of Verdi’s Falstaff is a fugue. And the last movement is a fantasy, a very
free form like the second movement. The string quartets and the piano
sonatas are in very free forms. Some of the songs have simpler, A-B-A-
C-A forms. But, in general, the freedom of form is something that makes
Ives particularly difficult to conduct. What helps sometimes is follow¬
ing the speed changes, which are so clearly indicated, and thus con¬
tribute to bringing whatever form exists to the fore.
I’d like to emphasize finally that I don’t consider myself more
 182
Conductors on Conducting

of an Ives expert than a Schubert expert—if anything, I consider myself

a Tchaikovsky expert. I do more Tchaikovsky than anything else.

Well, everybody’s entitled to some eccentricity.

No, what I’m trying to say applies, with all respect, to my eminent col¬
leagues too. Haitink, for example, is a great Mahlerian, but he also does
other composers very well. I would say that I conduct Ives the way I
conduct any other composer. There is no question that when I do, let’s
say, Schubert, I can’t help it, I have a different frame of mind from
when I conduct Mozart. Then again, recently I conducted a concert of
nothing but Mozart and Schubert, and the next concert was nothing
but Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, and it was so different, it was like a
different world — it was almost like changing professions. When I con¬
duct Ives, I don’t apply any specific secret ideas, but there are specific
things about Ives that come through — one can’t help it. When I do Pro¬
kofiev, there is a percussive quality that comes through, and an edge,
an angular quality, which also comes through in Stravinsky, and in
many cases it comes through in Ives. And when I do Ives I try to bring
out the humor.
 183
Jose Serebrier on Ives

The Jose Serebrier Ives discography is regrettably brief, but precisely

pertinent to our chapter. It consists of the two recordings of the Fourth
Symphony discussed at length above: The 1965 Stokowski version on
Columbia/CBS, in which Serebrier served as second conductor; and
Serebrier’s own “solo” version on RCA, released for the Ives centenary
celebration in 1974, but currently unavailable in Britain.
Sir Adrian
Boult
on
Elgar
EMI, LTD./REG WILSON
EMI, LTD./REG WILSON
 Sir Adrian Boult received me at his London flat in March 1977, a few
days before his eighty-eighth birthday. His extraordinary recall of the
events in a professional career spanning more than six decades was
matched by his eagerness to help. Only at one moment, two-thirds of
the way through our ninety-minute taping session, did a detail briefly
elude him: “Oh, my memory, my memory!” he exclaimed, thumping
his brow in annoyance. And the day after we talked, he took the
trouble to telephone me at my home in Norfolk, one hundred miles
out of London, to add a few more points that he thought might be
useful.
With an English-gentlemanly graciousness that seems, in
human terms, to fit him peculiarly well for the role of Elgar inter¬
preter, Boult combines an utter and refreshing lack of pretension.
Right up until the last year or two, when the effects of a serious op¬
eration have forced him to use cars, he would always arrive for re¬
hearsals and concerts by bus or subway. He is in many ways the
antithesis of the autocratic image cultivated by some famous conduc¬
tors. Yet his training—an Oxford Doctorate of Music, followed, in
1912 and 1913, by studies in Leipzig under Arthur Nikisch and Max
Reger—aligns him more firmly with the nineteenth-century tradition
than any other conductor before the public today. Though restricted
now to recordings and to an occasional public appearance to con¬
duct half a concert at a time, his continued activity is perhaps our
last remaining link, at only one remove, with the musical world of
Austria, Germany, and Hungary one hundred years ago.

189
 M ore than any other composer, even including Rich¬
ard Strauss, Elgar marks his scores and parts so
meticulously that there’s practically nothing more
for the conductor to do. There are only three or four places where I ven¬
ture even to alter any of the dynamics in Elgar’s music, because they are
so perfectly right. All you do is tell the orchestra to play what they see,
and the singers the same. To an English orchestra Elgar is practically
foolproof, you just play it. At a rehearsal, you just rehearse it.

Bernard Shore, in his book Sixteen Symphonies, says that no

other composer has written more effectively and at the same
time more perfectly for the orchestra than Elgar. Even Richard
Strauss and Wagner, he says (and being an orchestral violist
himself, he had a good vantage point), wrote impossibilities
from time to time, but Elgar never did. In view of all this preci¬
sion and skill, what do you work on when you’re preparing,
say, another performance of the Elgar Second Symphony with
the London Philharmonic?
I don’t work on anything, I just go through it at a rehearsal. I still do
mostly what Nikisch did —straight through a movement, and then
come back on three or four points.

A moment ago you said, “To an English orchestra.” Are you

thinking of a special affinity that an English orchestra or con¬
ductor might have for an English composer? In the conductor’s
case, is it something inborn, or simply the application of his
skills as a conductor? Is there something special about being
English that makes Elgar a natural composer for you to do and,
shall we say, Hans Henkemans not a natural composer for you
to do? Is ethnic criticism valid, the kind of criticism that says if
Giulini conducts Brahms it’s an ltalianate performance, and this
sort of thing?

191
 192
Conductors on Conducting

Well, I think there’s a little truth in that, but very little. In my case with
Elgar and Vaughan Williams, it wasn’t anything mysterious. I just hap¬
pened to get interested in them very early in my career, and I did them,
and it’s grown more and more as people have gone on asking me to do
them. I don’t think anything took me in the direction of these com¬
posers except ordinary human circumstances. I happened to meet Elgar
when I was seventeen, or sixteen, about that age. And then I had a
stroke of luck over the Second Symphony. It had only had one or two
performances before the First World War, and it was really rather a
flop.

And you conducted, I believe, the first successful performance.

Well, old Victor Beigel, the singing teacher—he taught Gervase Elwes,
amongst others, and he spent some years in New York as a teacher—was
in London for quite a long time, and he was a great friend of ours. I
forget how I met him, but I had lessons from him too, for singing. And
he had an American friend who wanted to lancer a bit a young fiddler
he was interested in. So we jointly took Queen’s Hall, and Beigel said
to me: “Don’t forget, it’s now three years since the war, and Elgar’s
Second Symphony has never had a real airing. Would you like to do
it?” I said yes, of course I would, and I did it, and it was a tremendous
success. They were ready for it, and they hadn’t been before, that’s
what it was.

I’m glad that you take this circumstantial view because, to make
my own drift clearer, I feel very critical of the approach that
emphasizes origins.
Yes, I think you’re quite right. I think really there’s very little to that.
But I should say you’ve touched on the absolutely extreme case: Itali¬
ans and Brahms. There aren’t many Italians who really seem to me to
get to the bottom of Brahms, though there are some. I think French
people understand Brahms better than Italians. I can’t say why. But
after all, my experience is limited, I don’t go about much.

Monteux was one of those Frenchmen, perhaps. But then some

of the greatest Elgar performances in my experience have been
from people like him.
Yes, that’s quite true.

Monteux’s Enigma Variations, for example, for me is still one

 193
Sir Adrian Boult on Elgar

of the supreme performances of that work, so I’m glad you don’t

feel that there’s something special about being English, or being
raised in a certain tradition. But then you did mention that
Elgar’s music, “to an English orchestra,” is practically fool¬
proof—it more or less plays itself. When you’ve conducted an
American or a European orchestra in Elgar, have you found that
there are things you need to do that you don’t need to do when
you’re preparing an Elgar work with an English orchestra?
I don’t think so. I’ve not, of course, been abroad very much. I was one
of those lucky people, you see. In 1930 there was the BBC Symphony
Orchestra, and, well, if I went away, I had to make do with two or
three rehearsals when I was a guest conductor. I had unlimited rehears¬
al at home, and I didn’t really want to go about much.

You didn’t have to be what James Levine calls an itinerant.

Exactly, no. For twenty years I was very lucky. But I did the Second
Symphony in Vienna, I’ve done the Enigma Variations in Chicago,
and I think it all went quite pleasantly. I don’t think there were any
special problems.

I wonder how much you feel that a conductor coming to Elgar

needs any kind of background material of a more general, cul¬
tural kind.
No, I don’t think so. As a matter of fact, there was a recent issue of the
First Symphony by Solti, and it had very good notices from the English
critics. I remember Nikisch doing the First Symphony soon after it was
out, and he got quite praised by the English critics —just doing it from
the score.

And yet it seems to me that Elgar is one of a small group of

composers who have the special problem or opportunity, for the
performer today, that there is more than one body of material
to go on. In Elgar’s case there are three. Instead of just having a
score (as you have with Beethoven) plus a very vaguely filtered
tradition, you have the scores, you have Elgar’s own recordings,
and you yourself, of course, have first-hand experience of seeing
and hearing Elgar at work. How do you feel a conductor relates
those elements to each other? What respective weight do you
give to the various things? For instance, those two slight modifi¬
cations in the Second Symphony—the lengthened trumpet note
 194
Conductors on Conducting

in the finale and the drum roll coming off a little bit earlier in the
slow movement—how should a conductor coming fresh to Elgar
estimate the respective weight of the authorities on that sort of
thing? 1 notice, for example, that in the existing recordings of the
Second Symphony all the English conductors lengthen the
trumpet note and the conductors from outside the English tradi¬
tion play what’s in the score.
Well, that just happens to have been a thing that Elgar wanted to add.
We all know about it and the others don’t. I think it’s almost chance. Of
course, Elgar very seldom changed his mind. As you know, Brahms al¬
ways heard a work at least once before he allowed it to be printed. El¬
gar’s thinking was the exact reverse. I remember seeing Elgar hand a
miniature score of Falstaff to Nikisch as we were sitting down to hear
Elgar rehearse it at the Leeds Festival. I saw that happen—it was the first
performance, but the work was already in print. And I think most of
Elgar’s stuff was done like that—not the First Symphony, of course,
but later things.

Apart from specific changes and points like that trumpet note,
in preparing today a performance of the First Symphony or the
Second Symphony, how do you approach the difference between
Elgar’s scores and Elgar’s own performances? You’ve mentioned
in the past the problems that Elgar faced in the recording studio,
and I wonder if you’d like to say something about that.
Well, I would say that actually I’m quite sure that, in my career, the
worst performance I ever gave of an Elgar work was when I did the First
Symphony a day or two after I had played his recording. I can’t explain
it very well, but I do know that he was always in a hurry in the record¬
ing studio, because, of course, he was still imbued with that awful four-
minutes-per-side business, and the result was he did hurry things. I’m
not going to say that he hurried things in live performance. I heard him
mostly in the Three Choirs —the annual festival at Worcester, Glouces¬
ter, and.Hereford —and there he always had space and time, and the
cathedral acoustic, and it was always perhaps on the slow side. That’s
why I’m on the slow side in my Elgar, perhaps.

There’s one particular question of tempo —in the first movement

of the Second Symphony—that links up with the more general
question whether there are weaknesses in Elgar that the conduc¬
tor somehow feels he has to play down, to camouflage. In the
 195
Sir Adrian Boult on Elgar

1950s when Elgar hadn’t yet attained the kind of acceptance 1

think he now has, there was a very general feeling that the sym¬
phonies were great works but definitely too long. I remember
hearing a performance you gave of the Second Symphony during
the series of coronation concerts at the Royal Festival Hall. I
remember being bowled over by it, but I remember also partic¬
ularly the review in The Times saying that Sir Adrian was the on¬
ly conductor of this work with whom one didn’t feel that the first
movement was twice as long as it should be. You played it in
those days faster than most people. Now, in your latest recording
you play it distinctly more slowly than you did then. I wonder if
this change of approach is perhaps due to the fact that we no
longer have a problem with Elgar in the way that audiences then
seemed to have.
Yes, I think you’re right. Of course, I’m not frightfully conscious about
that, and when I change I am usually quite unconscious of it. The BBC,
of course, always times things very carefully, and in all my twenty years
with them there were very few changes, they used to say. I was always
within a second or two of the same tempo. But I can quite understand
that latterly I have taken a little more time about certain things. Arthur
Bliss always said he hurried because he got so excited about conduct¬
ing his own work, and the other chap, Malcolm Williamson, said, “I
always like to savor my orchestration, so I’m rather slower.” I’m afraid
I don’t really know quite when I am doing things differently. Elgar, of
course, didn’t. That’s a point you might be interested in. In the days
when I was hearing Elgar a fair amount, I took to not only marking El¬
gar scores “EE rallentando,, at some point where he made one and it
wasn’t marked, but I would put “EE, whatever it is, 1940-something,”
because it wouldn’t be there the next year. I’ve got a number of things
like that in my scores.

I wonder if that applies to what has always seemed to me a crux

of interpretation in the first movement of the First Symphony,
which is that change into 3/2 time [figure 17 in the score]. The
question is whether one makes the bars equivalent or the beats
equivalent. Elgar marks the bars equal.
Must be beats, the bars won’t work. I think you’ll find he did some¬
thing different there. Look at what I’ve written in my score. The beats
are equal. He didn’t tell me to do that, that’s me. I heard him, and he
was obviously doing exactly minim equals minim.
 196
Conductors on Conducting

It’s very curious that something like that survives in the score. The
trouble is that there are one or two conductors with a sense of
faithfulness here who try to do it with the bars equal. It’s very
hard for a critic to know what attitude to take to a conductor
who’s obviously being faithful to what he sees and who tries to
do what he reads in the score, when it’s something like this that
just sounds wrong, and when Elgar himself in his own record¬
ing clearly does it the other way.
That’s funny. I’ve known that all my life —well, since I wrote that in
the score —and I’ve never told the publishers about it. I think Novello’s
ought to be told to change that. I’ll let them know.

At the moment, it’s something that one simply has to know.

One simply has to know, you’re quite right.

If you didn’t know—if you hadn’t heard Elgar do it—you would

still, presumably, from your inner conviction of what makes
sense in the music, have to do it beat equals beat?
I probably should in time, but I think it’s quite likely that I would give
one or two performances before that got through the wool. My wool
is pretty thick. I’m pretty slow to do a thing like that, and I quite likely
would have had two or three performances wrong before I changed it.
I’m a fairly conservative-minded person, I don’t do too much violence.
But then it was a composer, Sibelius, who said to me: “If ever your mu¬
sical instinct wants you to do something different from my markings,
please obey your instinct.” And I’m afraid I do, usually.
There are some other interesting places in the First Symphony.
There’s this passage in the last movement, from figure 122 for about
four pages, which I always used to say Elgar gave to his cook to write
for him because I just can’t place it in the movement. But I’ve now taken
to doing it rather lighter than it’s marked. It’s not a blazing/ortos/rao,
it’s a reasonable fortissimo, gently. I make a great deal of difference
between the pointed staccato and the dot staccato and when he puts a
hairpin and when he puts a line on it— four kinds of staccato. I think it
freshens the thing up if you do that for that passage.

It’s interesting that there seem to be technical problems in the

passage that don’t strike the eye, by which I mean that I very
rarely hear a performance where the entries on the fourth
crotchet are really perfectly timed. Somehow or other, although
 197
Sir Adrian Boult on Elgar

it doesn’t look difficult on the page, it seems to be particularly

difficult for conductors or orchestras to make that really on the
fourth crotchet as opposed to slightly late.
Yes, well, of course, so many wind things are slightly late, aren’t they, if
you really listen to them. Only the best orchestras don’t do that. Any¬
way, a little later in the First Symphony comes the place where I, shall I
say, take more on myself than anywhere else in the whole of Elgar. I’ve
told you, I do what I’m told practically always. First there’s that won¬
derful passage where the harps come in [figure 130 Jf.]. He knew that
was coming—that’s why he let the cook do that other bit, he didn’t
mind what happened beforehand. And then, from 146, you’ve got an
extraordinary situation. We needn’t go into too much detail, but
you’ve got fortissimo for some oboes, you’ve got mezzo-forte for the
third trumpet, who has the tune (the other trumpets haven’t got the
tune), and then all this racketing about with the strings. Well now, in
the racketing about, I emphasize the sforzando off the beat. I then say,
it doesn’t matter, these quavers needn’t be so clearly heard, the tune is
in the background. He’s thinking of this last-desk business that he uses
throughout this symphony—just the last desk of first violins, second
violins, violas, and cellos play the tune with the third trumpet and the
oboes. It’s in the back of your mind —the tune is still going on, and
that’s all there is to it. People who try and make this effective and bring
out the tune are quite wrong. You have the first strain of the tune, for
the first two pages. Then comes the second strain of the tune, louder,
and with far fewer of the quavers against it. Then, louder still, we get
the first four notes again, and then comes the one that really must be
the climax. And the extraordinary thing is that he’s not marked it right,
because I think he should have put a fresh fortissimo in that bar, three
before 149. Yes, 149 is the basic climax of the whole thing: The trum¬
pet notes, four times on E-flat, and then E natural —amazing note,
that note! Now, you see that empty bar in the strings at 149? When
Vaughan Williams was listening to the first rehearsal of his London
Symphony as a youngish man, near the end of the first movement
there’s a passage where the tune is given entirely to trombones —two
bars’ quotation from the second subject. The story of that is that Vaughan
Williams was listening, you see, and he said, “That doesn’t sound bril¬
liant, why aren’t those trombones blazing out?” A voice from behind
him—Cecil Forsyth — shouted down: “Take out those cellos and basses,
Ralph, and I think you’ll get it.” So the orchestra played it once again,
the trombones by themselves, without the cellos and the basses.
 198
Conductors on Conducting

This corresponds exactly with an experience I had with the Pro¬

kofiev Third Symphony. I don’t think it’s a very good work,
generally speaking, but it has in it a moment that is an object-
lesson in orchestration. He’s building a huge climax with the
whole orchestra, and finally he makes the climax by taking out
the strings, and the brasses come out at you like that! They im¬
mediately sound twice as loud.
Weil, here I think Elgar has made a mistake. He’s taken the violins and
violas out there, half-a-dozen bars before 149, on the last appearance
but one of the four-note figure, and then they come in here and muff the
last one, and the result is that the last four bars before the climax don’t
sound as brilliant as the ones before them. It’s always worried me.

So what do you do there? Do you mark them down?

Well, I don’t mark them down, but I just tell the brass that the last four
bars before 149 are the bars that matter. They give everything there,
just in those last four bars, and then they hand it over to the trumpets
and horns with the E-flat unison.

Of course, the wider point there, taking it from the passage you
started with —the third trumpet and the last desks [figure 146] —
is presumably that, if you have too much tune already there,
then you’re destroying the gradual control, and it’s too much
too soon.
Much too soon. You see, practically the only people who are fortissimo
are the oboes. I think there is afortissimo there, but it’s not a full thing
at all. As you say, it wants to sound rather in the distance, and then the
whole thing gradually builds up from that passage.

On the question again of changes in pulse, there’s a slightly subtler

problem, it seems to me, in certain places in the first movement
of the Second Symphony — time changes where one can’t quite
tell whether they’re meant to be faster or slower. Quite early on
in the movement, he writes a Tempo primo, and it’s hard to tell
from the way the tempo has built up before that whether we
should actually be reining in a little bit or going straight on, and
in his recording he goes straight on. It’s in the transition from
the first subject to the second subject [figure 7 in the score]. In
your performances I feel a distinct holding back at that point,
whereas Elgar goes straight on, he ignores his own marking.
 199
Sir Adrian Boult on Elgar

Well now, about that first movement, I’ve got round to doing some¬
thing that’s perhaps contradictory to the markings, which is wrong, of
course. But all these changes of tempo, you know, are very, very slight,
and if you look at the metronome marks you’ll see that they’re very of¬
ten only one or two notches on the metronome, and really hardly worth
thinking about. And I’ve got round to it because I remember very well
his saying, “So many conductors do far too much for that!” He actual¬
ly said that. I don’t know who he was thinking about, but anyhow, it
was being done a lot at that time, and he didn’t like to have the changes
done very emphatically. And that perhaps partly impelled me to do
that symphony with no sudden changes of tempo at all, except one,
which I’ve now squashed too —there’s one place, and I think it’s actu¬
ally the one you were speaking of, and I did do it rather suddenly slow¬
er, and I’m giving it up, I’m going slower a little before it, because I
don’t like those jumps anywhere in a symphonic movement like that. I
like to prepare always. And actually you’ll find that, subtly, I do very
often prepare changes of tempo in such a way, I hope, that people
won’t be aware of them.
In the Schubert Great C Major Symphony, you know the tran¬
sition after the first subject. There are two triplet bars where there’s a
good crash going on; I slow down, and by the time it emerges from the
crash I’m a little slower, and the whole subject is a little bit slower. I’m
sorry to say I’m ashamed of the fact that I cannot find a tempo to suit,
in my view, both the second subject and the first subject. That’s why I
do that, and I do it in the corresponding place later on.

You say you’re ashamed of thatf

I think I am. I think a great classical movement ought to be in one tem¬
po, don’t you?

Well, we’re getting onto difficult ground here, because quite

honestly I used to think that, but I no longer do, and I no
longer do partly because of the enormous weight of evidence that
1 seem to be coming across as I get older. I’m thinking, for exam¬
ple, of Schindler’s account of Beethoven rehearsing the second
movement of his Second Symphony, in which he details some¬
thing like seven tempo modifications in about fifteen bars...
I didn’t know that.

... and a letter Brahms once wrote about a particular cellist’s

 200
Conductors on Conducting

performance of one of the sonatas, in which he says, “How I love

the way he slows down for the second subject!”— things like this.
And I’m increasingly coming to think this feeling that one ought
to have one tempo is very much determined by the kind of
influence Toscanini had on the orchestral life of our time, and I’m
coming closer to the other pole, the Furtwanglerian pole, in feel¬
ing that this was a mistaken austerity, and that one shouldn’t
feel ashamed about modifications.
You may be right. Well, perhaps it’s too strong to say I feel ashamed;
but I always like, in the Schubert, to conceal it behind that crash.

This question of pulse in a symphonic movement particularly

interests me in connection with Brahms. In your reading of the
first movement of the Brahms Second Symphony, which I find
an extraordinarily illuminating reading, I do feel a very gradual
evolution through the course of the exposition from one pulse
to a quite different pulse.
Dear old Harold Samuel taught me that: Any repeat should be played
as if it was written out, you let things grow from that. I now take the
beginning fairly slowly, and go much faster at the repeat.

But the interesting thing is that somehow, even in the first time
through the exposition, one feels this gradual evolution from
what I hear as a slowish one-in-a-bar to a very distinct three,
and to me it clarifies the structure of the movement enormously
because I feel very often the problem in Brahms of relating one
tempo to another can be avoided if one differentiates the beat
unit. The First Piano Concerto is a case of that. Everybody
talks about the difficulty of assimilating the F Major second
subject into the structure of the movement as a whole, and I
heard a performance that, by being wrong, illuminated for me
what one has to do there. The whole performance was so
distincly six-in-a-bar for the main body of the movement that
one was very conscious that the new six-in-a-bar was slower. A
fast six changing into a slower six is hard to miss. Whereas, if
the main body of the movement is taken two-in-a-bar, very def¬
initely, and then one relaxes into six at the new theme, the
difference is camouflaged. And in the Second Symphony the
way you, in your recording, develop from the one-beat opening
to three later in the exposition gives you again a different unit.
 201
Sir Adrian Boult on Elgar

You don’t have to have the exact correspondence of time, be¬

cause the listener isn’t concerned with the same unit. But if we
may turn to a more mechanical aspect of pulse, would you say
that in general the Elgar metronome markings are of serious im¬
portance to the conductorf
Oh, I think certainly, yes. I think he was very careful about it. Of course,
you know Vaughan Williams wasn’t. Vaughan Williams only bought
a metronome late in life. I don’t know what he did before that—he was
very naughty about it. The one really misleading one in Elgar is in
Enigma—the metronome mark for the eighth variation, where it’s the
arithmetic that he’s got wrong. Elgar has given the metronome mark
of the dotted crotchet as if it was a crotchet. That is to say, he’s given
52 as the time for the dotted crotchet. But 104 is the right time for the
quaver, and Elgar’s own recording shows that, because it’s played at
exactly that speed.

So in other words it’s thirty-odd to the dotted crotchet instead

of fifty-two.
That’s it. You can see how Elgar made the mistake—just miscalcu¬
lated, thinking it was a crotchet, not a dotted crotchet, and dividing
by two instead of three. The result is that if you’re faithful to the met¬
ronome mark it’s impossibly fast. Thirty years ago, when Rudolf
Schwarz first came to Bournemouth just after the war, he took a lot of
trouble to study English music. He conducted Enigma, and naturally
enough he did the eighth variation the way he found it marked in the
score. And there was an old master of mine, an old tutor from school,
who lived in retirement in Bournemouth, and he was often at Schwarz’s
rehearsals and always at the concerts, and a lot of the orchestra mem¬
bers went to him and said: “Mr. Prickett, you must write to Adrian
Boult and tell him to stop Schwarz doing this!” —very roundabout. We
did stop him, and I told Novello’s. They at once had it changed, and
there’s a little gummed slip in all the scores now.

When you were talking a little while ago about your problem
passage in the last movement of the First Symphony—the
“racketing about” in the strings —you mentioned the importance
of the sforzando off the beat. The point about the sforzandos
being more important than what follows raises for me a matter
of very general interest, and that is the whole question of the
nature of a sforzando accent. It seems to me, as a critic, that so
 202
Conductors on Conducting

often, when I’m reviewing a performance, I hear many sfor-

zandos that are in fact not sforzandos hut simply fortes. Even
though sforzando-piano — sfp—is more emphatic in that regard
than sforzando, nevertheless there still should be some element in
a sforzando of a stress that comes out at you and then falls back.
Would you say that this is something that some people do forget
about?
You’re quite right, it’s very much, very much neglected. That’s a real
point to remember, that a sforzando does not mean forte.

I despair of ever hearing, for example, the end of the slow move¬
ment of Beethoven’s Fifth done accurately in that regard. I am
thinking of the woodwind phrase, with the peak note sforzando
the first time and fortissimo the second. It’s always played iden¬
tically, you’ll very rarely hear any difference. And then there’s the
Beethoven Pastoral Symphony, which I understand you’re recor¬
ding soon. That’s one of the works where there are many ex¬
amples of the sforzando thing—in the development of the first
movement, where people so often just play loudly instead of giv¬
ing an accent that then goes back. I heard some brutal perfor¬
mances of that work by George Szell, which were just loud and
horrible at those points.
Yes, of course, the going back is the operative thing. It’s perfectly true. I
do very much agree with you that there should be a difference. And that
brings us to another thing, which is the hairpins in Schubert. Do you
know about that?

About their really being accents and not diminuendos? Yes, well,
Denis Vaughan, I believe, did a lot of digging, and came up with
about 900 of them in the Great C Major Symphony alone that
had been printed as if they were diminuendos in all the editions
— the very end, the final chord.
The final chord—ridiculous! Bruno Walter one day said to me: “I always
hope that I shall have the courage to play that really diminuendo some
time, but I’ve never dared yet.” How can it be?
You know what English rehearsal conditions are. I was once
doing that symphony with the New Philharmonia, and I hadn’t played
to the end of the last movement in rehearsal, and when I got to the last
chord in the performance, suddenly I felt a diminuendo coming from
the orchestra that some fool of a conductor had made them do previ-
 203
Sir Adrian Boult on Elgar

ously. I hastily switched off! When I walked off, I said to the leader, “Do
you really play that as a diminuendo?” “Yes, Mr. So-and-so asked for
it.” There are some in the Unfinished too—the first page of the slow
movement, for instance. On a single page of the facsimile, there are
dozens, and you can’t tell if they are diminuendos or hairpin accents.
And with a real diminuendo, in the same way, you have another prob¬
lem, which is making it go back far enough. Orchestras always go not
quite far enough back —they make a crescendo, and then they make
the diminuendo not quite back to the bottom of the crescendo.

We’ve been reduced to finding all these interesting problems in

other composers rather than in Elgar because, in a sense, you’ve
evaded the question brilliantly by emphasizing so much how
much is in his scores, and how much you have to just play what
is written. But getting back to his music, I wonder whether you
feel that the characteristics that make him Elgar are very much
characteristics of his place and time, or whether they’re charac¬
teristics that mark him apart from his contemporaries and com¬
patriots. In other words, is he very much a product of the late
nineteenth century European and English tradition, or do you
think of him as swimming against what was happening? Be¬
cause in a sense it seems to me rather funny that we value Elgar
so much in this age —and so much writing about him today em¬
phasizes this—for the uncertainties and the doubts and the
questionings in his mind as a composer coming in a period of
great national certainty; whereas, per contra, we appreciate
Tippett for the certainties that he’s wrung out of a very uncer¬
tain time —and this seems to me to throw a lot of light on our
own hang-ups. But I wonder how you feel about Elgar in this
context: Is he a product or is he a reversal?
That’s not too easy. It’s a very interesting question, but I really don’t
know what I would think about it. It’s the kind of thing that the mere
performer doesn’t bother about very much. But looking back to the
period, I can tell you that my mother, whose musical taste I valued,
took quite a time to get accustomed to Elgar. People like Hubert Parry
we were fond of.

Were they less contradictory than Elgar perhapsf Less self-con¬

tradictory, less complex?
They certainly were, yes, much more direct. And in terms of the impact
 204
Conductors on Conducting

Elgar made on his contemporaries, you got such an interesting contrast,

too, between the works of his that were well received at the first perfor¬
mances and those that flopped. The first performance of The Dream of
Gerontius, of course, must have been thoroughly bad. Nobody
understood, Hans Richter himself didn’t understand it.

There was the mess-up over rehearsals.

Yes, all that. So the initial failure of Gerontius is understandable. But
I’m always a little puzzled why, in 1911, they didn’t snap up the Second
Symphony. That flopped. It was a bad house, and it was an afternoon
concert, I believe. But the story is Elgar came off-stage at the end and
said, “Oh, they don’t like it, Henry.” That’s what he said to old Wood.
And it wasn’t until after the war that the piece was accepted. Why did
the Second Symphony take all that time?

Michael Kennedy, in his Portrait of Elgar, offers two reasons for

that, which seem fairly convincing. One is the very downbeat
ending of the work, which is not the sort of thing that sets an au¬
dience on its feet; and secondly, the historical position of it, actu¬
ally coming to performance after the new king had been installed
and there was a sense of new optimism and a new positiveness in
the country, to which the sad, retrospective elements in the work
didn’t naturally appeal.
I’d forgotten that. I must have a look at it again. But it is rather puzzling
that some of Elgar was so successful and some of it so unsuccessful.

In a sense, perhaps the successful works were the ones that peo¬
ple could identify with because they saw the surface elements; but
there was so much more to him that didn’t jibe with the spirit of
the time.
Exactly. I can’t answer that at all finally for you. But I think he was a
bigger man than his contemporaries. Mind you, I’m not at all sure that
Parry, if he hadn’t been messed up with so much else, the College and
his yachting and all the rest of it, might not have been a much greater
composer than he was. I think the best of Party is absolutely magnifi¬
cent. Do you know the last things, the Songs of Farewell for unaccom¬
panied chorus? There are six of them for different numbers of voices,
and the seven-part one, “There Is an Old Belief,” and two or three of the
others are really very fine. Oh, Hubert Parry could do it when he really
 205
Sir Adrian Boult on Elgar

had time, but very often he never had. We knew him fairly well. He would
have a score open on his desk, and he used to write two bars while
waiting for the lunch bell, that kind of thing. He was always doing that,
but naturally it was second-rate stuff, a lot of it.

The point about the two different kinds of Elgar suggests to me

a very specific question about the Enigma Variations. Now, it is
obviously a marvelous work, and one loves it. But for me it’s
not one of the supreme Elgar works. For me the greatest Elgar
works are the two symphonies, the two concertos, and one or
two other pieces, like Falstaff.
Don’t you admit The Kingdom?

That, I must confess, I have to do more work on. I’ve sung in

it, in the chorus, and of course I know your recording, and I
think it is a fantastic work.
Oh, it’s a magnificent work!

But I think I’ve come to the conclusion gradually that, for me, the
Elgar works that are the greatest are the ones that don’t end in
unqualified triumph. They end with questions, or questioned
triumph. You know, in the First Symphony—such a triumphant
ending, but there are those off-beat things saying no. And when
I discovered finally, which wasn’t very long ago, that he only
wrote that triumphal ending for the Enigma at the urging of
those people who said the initial one was ineffective—well, I would
very much like to know whether you know what happened to
the original ending, and whether there was any possibility of re¬
suscitating it. I wonder whether it might not have been a greater
work with the original ending.
I conducted it three weeks ago.

You did?
When Frederick Ashton took hold of the Enigma to make a ballet, he
said, “The end is too long,” and John Lanchbery, his conductor, went
to the British Museum where he found the score with the original ending.

And it had been there all the time?

Yes. And Ashton uses it. The big ending is out altogether.
 206
Conductors on Conducting

What do you feel about the restoration of the original ending for
concert performance?
Well, I haven’t thought really along the lines that you were suggesting.
That’s very interesting, what you say about the triumphal endings. I al¬
ways feel... I need that wonderful accelerando and all the rest of it, and
of course I love that change of pulse, and the fact that he’s marked the
new tempo, presto, one bar too soon [just before figure 79 in the score].
All that is so exciting, I think, I’d hate to lose it. No, I’m afraid I can’t be
dispassionate about that.

I wonder whether there’s any chance of your recording the origi¬

nal version, so that one could at least hear it. It occurred to me
in the abstract that it’s so much more enigmatic.
Yes, well, you’re quite right, it is more of an enigma.

Can I ask you finally about the Third Symphony? There are peo¬
ple who think that there is more to the Third Symphony than we
are led to believe.
Well, I was in the room when Carice, his daughter, brought the sketches
all to Reith, and Reith took them to the British Museum. Of course, I’ve
examined the sketches; they were reproduced in The Listener as well as
in Willy Reed’s book [W. H. Reed: Elgar As I Knew Him]. I can’t believe
there’s any more. I think it’s just one of those silly things. Elgar was the
sort of person who loved that kind of thing happening, and it’s happened
to him after his death —people inventing things, and enigmas! Nonsense
of that kind. I don’t think there’s any humbug about the Third Sym¬
phony at all. The Third Symphony’s there, and you can see exactly what
it consists of. I was, of course, the principal protagonist when Bantock
wrote —he wrote to me, actually, on behalf of the BBC —to ask wheth¬
er he might finish it and I had to write back and say that Elgar definitely
told Willy Reed that nothing must be done. And I said, I think if you
really examine the sketches, there isn’t enough to go by. You can only
just fake a first movement. You could do a first movement, you couldn’t
do anything else. Much less than Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, say.
 207
Sir Adrian Boult on Elgar

Boult has recorded all of the most important Elgar, much of it several
times over, and a fair quantity of minor Elgar too. Indeed, his recording
of the Serenade for Strings is so beautifully and persuasively played as
practically to convert that work from minor to major status by sheer
interpretative power. Like Boult’s other most recent Elgar recordings,
it is available on the Angel/EMI label. With the exception of Falstaff
and The Dream of Gerontius, currently to be found only in the Eng¬
lish catalogues, all of the works mentioned in the chapter—the two
symphonies, the two concertos, the Enigma Variations, and The
Kingdom (this last released in the United States by Connoisseur Soci¬
ety)—are available in recent Boult performances on both sides of the
Atlantic. His latest (1976) version of the Second Symphony with the
London Philharmonic Orchestra makes an especially interesting
study: It is the fifth recording he has made of the work over a period of
thirty-one years, and a comparison with his second and fourth record¬
ings (both with the same orchestra, 1957 and 1968, Pye and Lyrita
labels respectively—available in the United States only as imports)
throws light on the changes in interpretation we discuss. Many of
Elgar’s own recordings are currently available in England— the earlier
acoustical ones on Pearl, the electrical ones on EMI or World Records
(again, only to be found as imports in the United States) — and provide
a further interpretative touchstone indispensable to the serious student.
Carlo Maria
Giulini
on
Brahms
EMI, LTD./CLIVE BARDA
EMI, LTD./CLIVE BARDA
Like one or two other of the conductors I wanted in this book. Carlo
Maria Giulini at first agreed and then had second thoughts. As will
appear, it was certainly not any lack of sympathy with the proposed
topic that deterred him. Having first come to international promi¬
nence in the 1950s as a conductor of Italian opera —born at Barletta
in 1914, and trained in Rome under Alessandro Bustini, Alfredo
Casella, and Bernardino Molinari, he made his La Scala debut as
long ago as the 1951-1952 season —he has in the past decade worked
almost exclusively in the symphonic field, and it was during his years
as Principal Guest Conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
around 1970 that I began to think of him as one of the great Brahms-
ians of our day.
What made him hesitate was the feeling that he lacked the
ability to express in words those perceptions that it was his profes¬
sional task to embody in the actual performance of Brahms’s music.
But he was willing, in May 1977, to discuss my request over lunch at
the Connaught Hotel, the appropriately gracious and dignified estab¬
lishment he often stays at when he is conducting in London. Any¬
thing remotely brash or plastic would be incompatible with Giulini’s
personal style. He arrived fresh from a recording session, and “fresh”
is a word not lightly chosen. However hard he had been working, he
looked, as usual, as if all his clothes had been newly received from
the tailor that morning. Finally, on the condition that I promise to
omit his contribution if it did not meet my standards (he waived the
right to approve it himself), he agreed to see me again the following
day and tape his thoughts about conducting Brahms.
Our conversation accordingly began the next morning in
the hotel lounge, and then, when the sound of pneumatic drills in the
street outside became too much of a distraction, continued in his
room. He was in the middle of a typically arduous rehearsal, con¬
cert, and recording schedule. But just as typically, his manner was

213
 214

totally free from baste. Tranquillo, largamente, Zeit nehmen — those

are some of the musical directions he discussed in the following
pages. And the ability to take time for properly considerate thought
remains characteristic of this admirable man, who, even at the peak
of his career, insists on keeping a sizable corner of his (and his fam¬
ily’s) life inviolate from the pressures that too often make for routine,
alike in performance and in thinking. For Giulini, clearly, there are
no facile answers, and he wishes the following observations to be
taken as tentative explorations, not as the pronouncements of an
authority.
 S ince my early years as a student, Brahms has been
perhaps the one composer who took possession of me
with the most irresistible prepotenza. Prepotenza is when
a dictator says, “Yes, I will come to you, I will come with you.” There
was first of all the experience I had as a violist in the orchestra, playing
Brahms under many conductors, all with different conceptions, and
then my experience of the chamber music, playing the quartets and
quintets. The involvement was not only musical, but human too—the
unbelievable human contact that Brahms is ready to give.
When I started to conduct, the first great piece that I led was
the Brahms Fourth Symphony. Except for one work, my growing in¬
volvement with Brahms was natural and free from particular difficul¬
ties. Of course, you understand what I mean: The problems, in a gener¬
al sense, are enormous when you approach a genius like Brahms, or any
other of the great composers. Little men like us, how can we hope to get
inside the minds of geniuses like Brahms or Beethoven or Mozart? But I
should say that almost never in Brahms—not in the symphonies, not in
the chamber music, not in the Haydn Variations—did the contrapuntal
style present me with the special problem of “What shall I do?” Even
though Brahms has this unbelievable knowledge of counterpoint, of how
to move the parts, you never have the impression, “Ah, here comes the
counterpoint!” At a certain stage of study, when you are going into the
score, you see it. But in performance the counterpoint arrives like magic.
The only Brahms composition I know where I have had a true
problem, a kind of frontier through which I couldn’t go, is the German
Requiem. Until recently, I never thought I could perform the work. This
has nothing to do with the general conception of the Requiem. It’s my
personal feeling; it was difficult for me to bring the contrapuntal sec¬
tions of the Requiem into a logical relation with what happened before
and what was going to happen after. I always had the feeling that the
contrapuntal parts were about something separate. The music is going

215
 216
Conductors on Conducting

along and it’s beautiful, in a style that’s lyrical or espressivo or dramatic.

Then suddenly it stops and —“All together, please!” —now the fugue
will start.
From a technical point of view, of course, everybody can read
a fugue or a fugato. This is not the problem. The problem for me was to
be involved one hundred percent in the musical and expressive necessity
of this point: Why do we arrive here at a fugue? This is a problem of
shaping, because the section has to be expressed not only through a lyri¬
cal line but also through the contrapuntal movement of the parts. But
more than that, it has to belong to the general conception of the musical
idea of the whole work. I have thought for a long time about this prob¬
lem, and now I think I have found my solution. I am going to perform
the work, and I will try to do it as well as I can.
So far as I know, the Requiem is the only work that has this
problem. Perhaps it belongs to the form of a Requiem, which is in a way
the form of the Mass, where traditionally at a certain point the fugue
comes along. Brahms was close to this tradition, which comes from
Bach and Mozart and Beethoven and Schubert.

As for the rest of his output, it is perhaps natural that for a viola
player, playing chamber music and in orchestras, Brahms would
be a composer who has a very strong impact from the start, be¬
cause unlike most other composers he writes interestingly for all
the parts.
Absolutely. You can always see that the bones, the blood, are really there,
and the movement of the parts is so interesting. Of course, playing
viola in a string quartet and also in an orchestra is, in a way, an ideal
situation to give you a feeling of the whole ensemble. Generally, for in¬
stance, the first violins lead everything, they have the melody. But in
the viola, partly because of your position in the middle, you can really
feel part of all the strings. And the middle parts, second violin as well
as viola, are so important in the substance of the body — not only in the
way the parts move, but also in the sonority of Brahms.
It’s difficult to find the right words to express this and not be
misunderstood, because there is no music where something is less im¬
portant. In music everything is important, every note is important for
everybody. But in Brahms the hundred percent participation, the total
intensity of every note is, I think, particularly and absolutely funda¬
mental. At a given moment what we hear is the line that leads the com¬
position. But this is the physiognomy of a face —the nose, the mouth,
 217
Carlo Maria Giulini on Brahms

the eyes. Then there is something which is very important, and that is
what is inside this. And this interior body, with the bones and the nerves
and the blood — this is really something that I should say in Brahms, per¬
haps more than in other composers, needs to be absolutely a part of the
physiognomy of the line. It is not only a harmonic or rhythmic element;
it really participates one hundred percent in the life of the line, in all di¬
mensions at once.

Does this lead one to approach the choice of tempo in Brahms in

a particular manner, and perhaps to set more moderate tempi
than one might otherwise set in order to give time for all the lines
to speak?
This is true. I think it is necessary to give time, not only to play the parts,
but so that every note, even the shortest, if you saw it through the mi¬
croscope, can have the kind of life of which we are speaking—not only
physically, but in an espressivo way. That word must be taken in the right
perspective. For me, it is very important to have the time to express this
dimension in the espressivo way, and the dramatic way, and also dy¬
namically. There should never be the impression that the tempo is set
with an eye to just one effect— a very fast tempo, for instance, just fora
virtuoso or a fortissimo effect. There must always be not only a musi¬
cal but a dramatic reason. I should never make a tempo fast in Brahms
purely for a technical reason.
There is also the question of the unity of tempo, and of the
modification of tempo within a movement. Ideally, I think, it should be
possible to listen to a performance and not have the impression that there
are modifications at all. In the meantime, there are a hundred modifi¬
cations. But they should be so magically done, and the tempo should
be so close to the musical reason —to the choice of thematic, melodic,
or rhythmic material —that when you listen, you shouldn’t say, “now
the second theme is slower than the first” or “this is accelerando to
return to the other tempo.” I think it’s impossible to play two bars
really in the same tempo, if you measure them with a metronome.
Brahms often writes rallentando or agitato. But whatever the
fantasy in the movement, whatever the differences of tempo or the kinds
of rubato, which are the life of the music, the final goal for the per¬
former should be this: That everything should develop as the totally
logical consequence of the dramatic development of the music. Then at
the moment at which you listen to the music and have the feeling that
there are these noticeable changes of tempo—then something is not right.
 218
Conductors on Conducting

In the finale of the Third Symphony, listening for the first time to
Furtwdngler’s recording, I suddenly had the feeling about halfway
through the movement that we were going about twice as fast as
when we started, but without the slightest awareness of where
the change had come.
Then, you see, this is the solution. In his conception of the structure of
the entire movement there is a logical development, a kind of pulse. Be¬
cause of that, the change of tempo is a logical consequence of the dis¬
course from beginning to end. To realize that there is a change in the
tempo you have to arrive at an intellectual or critical point, or com¬
pare mechanically with a metronome—because, as far as feeling can
judge, everything has become logical and consistent.
There are some score markings that Brahms uses in a very
characteristic way. Tranquillo, in the finale of the Second Symphony,
for example, is one of them, and another is largamente, as at the
fourth variation in the finale of the Fourth Symphony. I would agree
that these carry some indication for a relaxation of the tempo. This
kind of largamente is what Mahler meant later when he wrote Zeit
nehmen [“take your time”]. It means to allow time to play every note
with the kind of life each note needs, while still producing the effect of
logical consistency. Very much like tranquillo is dolce, the way
Brahms uses it in the first movement of the Fourth Symphony. There
are moments in which, in this unbelievable movement of clouds and of
waves, everybody suddenly stops. It’s like water without wind—with
nothing—a moment where you have the impression that something
has happened outside nature. Everything stops. There is no wind, no
movement, no birds, nothing, for a few moments. And then it’s enough,
and suddenly just a moment of wind goes through the trees, in the
leaves, and everything starts again to live. The start of the recapitu¬
lation in the first movement of the Fourth Symphony —that is one of
these moments. “Aspettazione” is the Italian word —expecting that
something will happen. Very often, again, I think Brahms’s tranquillo
is used in what I would call a Schubertian way, when tranquillo is ge-
mutlicb— sit down, be quiet, so, with a nice glass of wine, and enjoy.

To try to keep a tempo going through these passages is surely

going to be fatal.
I think so, yes, because the two things are so close together —the
physical element of the beat and the spiritual element of the piece, the
 219
Carlo Maria Giulini on Brahms

tranquillita. The problem, again, is that it must not be done in an intel¬

lectual way, but that everything should be as logical as Brahms is in his
composition. Because I think that never—whether in the shock of a dra¬
matic break in atmosphere, or in the approach through a beautiful land¬
scape to one of these moments of tranquillita—never in a Brahms sym¬
phony does anything happen that is not logical. Take, for instance, the
variations of the passacaglia in the Fourth Symphony. This is a miracle
of absolutely unbelievable logic—one idea. You forget completely that
everything is in eight-bar sections, because you follow this unbelievable
line where each variation is the consequence of the previous one and
prepares for the next one. Very often you don’t know— it’s a matter of
two or three bars—where one finishes and the next one begins, because
Brahms takes the cadence of the end of the eight bars to go into the next.
This, too, is a case where I think, if you examined it mathematically,
perhaps no one variation is the same as another in tempo. But the
listener shouldn’t notice this.

That passage at the end of the development in the first move¬

ment—that moment of waiting for the recapitulation — offers per¬
haps an interesting contrast with exactly the same section of Bee¬
thoven’s Fourth Symphony. Again you have a passage of great
tension and expectation, the hushed moment with the timpani,
waiting for the full theme to return. But I don’t feel this as a
hushed waiting in the same way as the Brahms, but rather as
moving toward the moment where the rocket goes up again. You
have to keep it going, surely, whereas in the Brahms you have to
wait, to take time and let it come.
Yes, this depends on a point that seems to me is very important. A pia¬
nissimo sometimes not only has the character of a pianissimo in the dy¬
namic, but is a pianissimo in the general atmosphere. Sometimes, on the
other hand, as in the Beethoven, a pianissimo is a fortissimo enclosed in
a small compass, waiting to explode. In these cases, to me, it would seem
absolutely wrong to perform the pianissimo like the tranquillo we were
talking about before. Tranquillo is really tranquillo — there is this mo¬
ment of real peace, and then something happens. But there are many
cases where this pianissimo is potentially the life of a fortissimo: Here
in the ears is a pianissimo, but there in the body it is fortissimo. It’s
sometimes very difficult to convince an orchestra of this, because the
moment many musicians see pianissimo they automatically reduce
 220
Conductors on Conducting

tension. But this can sometimes be a big mistake, because in these cases
it is impossible to arrive at tht fortissimo if the pianissimo is a pianissi¬
mo inside. To put it briefly, the dynamic problem is a completely sepa¬
rate matter from the dramatic intensity of the score. Of course there
are occasions, in Debussy for example, in La Mer and the Nocturnes,
where the pianissimo is something absolutely abstract—just atmo¬
sphere; and then there are the cases like the one in the first movement
of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. But very often the pianissimo is a pia¬
nissimo only in the dynamic element.

An example that comes to mind is the beginning of the last

movement of Brahms’s Second Symphony, piano sotto voce and
then pianissimo...
Exactly, which is agitato.

.. .as opposed to the development of that same movement.

Where we have the true tranquillo. That’s exactly it.

It’s almost a convention to talk about Brahms’s poor orchestra¬

tion, or imperfect orchestration, or insensitivity to sonorities.
Do you find any justification for this as a conductor, or do you
find that the orchestration does work? Are there special prob¬
lems in Brahms’s orchestration that you have to wrestle with?
I wouldn’t say that. In our time, of course, when the strings are much
more numerous, and the sonority of the strings has improved enor¬
mously because of steel strings and other things that make for a differ¬
ent technique, and now that concert halls are bigger, it is sometimes
good to double the number of woodwinds. I sometimes do that. It can
help, because not all halls have the acoustics of the Vienna Musikverein,
where everything sounds. It goes a little against what I would ideally
like to do. But double winds used with care —with care, not all the
time —can be helpful, because it’s clear that in the fortissimo that you
can produce today with, say, eighteen first violins, and the corre¬
sponding eight or nine double basses, and with the full sonority of
modern horns, trumpets, and trombones, the normal balance of the
woodwinds can easily not be perfect. And this solution is better than
putting down the sonority of the strings, which would be a pity at the
very moment when the full quality of sound is necessary, or forcing the
woodwinds out beyond the normal dynamics of the instruments so that
they cannot produce a round sonority.
Brahms needs the normal care for balance. But perhaps less
 221
Carlo Maria Giulini on Brahms

than other composers—certainly less than Beethoven and, if I can say

this with a little caution, also in a certain way less than Mozart. Because
in Mozart, for instance, if the trumpets and horns hold a forte for a
long note and in the meantime there is a passage for strings, we have to
put the trumpets and horns down immediately after their entry, to
leave space for the strings, or the woodwinds, to come out with the
necessary force. Of course, every good Mozart player knows auto¬
matically that the sonority has to be controlled in this way. For one
thing, Brahms knows exactly what he wants in the sound and he gets
it; and the sound of the Brahms orchestra is absolutely characteristic.
I would say also that he has a special and very, very definite
sense of the colors of the instruments. This you can see in the choice he
makes for solo wind parts and in his use of the brass —the use of the
trombones, for instance, at just the right moment.

The piccolo in the Tragic Overture, used always pianissimo...

Yes, absolutely. And another thing is in the third movement of the Fourth
Symphony —the entry of the triangle. It has the effect of illumination
— an extraordinary light. It’s like what you sometimes see in a painting
by a great painter: You know there is something remarkable there, you
can’t make out at first what it is, and finally you trace it to this incredi¬
ble use of light.

Does Brahms’s insistence on natural trumpets and, particularly,

natural horns give the conductor special problems? He was obvi¬
ously very much concerned about the quality of the open notes
on a horn, and the contrast between open notes and stopped
notes. That, of course, is difficult to preserve with modern in¬
struments. Is there a way that one can coax the horn players in
a modern orchestra, who are used to producing as even a tone
as possible, to make certain notes more significant?
I’m afraid not. I don’t know the solution for this, and it is a big prob¬
lem. Britten, in his Serenade, asks the horn to play the Prologue and
Epilogue on natural harmonics—it’s like the sound of the old corno da
caccia — and the trouble is that the harmonic notes really don’t sound
right for our intonation. Perhaps in a solo like that you can observe this
distinction between the different kinds of notes again, but then you
know that it’s a strange intonation for a special effect. In an orchestral
passage a note like that makes the orchestra sound out of tune, and
nobody is ready to accept this today.
The development of the horn’s technique in the last thirty or
 222
Conductors on Conducting

forty years has been enormous. Now I wonder if Brahms got, from the
new horn of his day, anything like the tone we have today.

You mean whether his hesitation stemmed rather from the in¬
strument’s technical imperfections at the time than from a belief
in the older, natural instrument as an ideal?
Exactly, because of the development of horn technique in the last forty
years, or fifty at most, and also the improvement in the quality of the
sound. Hornists now have a technique of helping the sound with the
hand that was not to be imagined years ago. I really think that if
Brahms could hear a good hornist play a valve instrument today he
would be very happy.

Schumann, who was very much the senior composer, embraced

the new horn enthusiastically, and wrote the Concertstiick for
four horns and other pieces using all the modern techniques of
the time, whereas Brahms, who was in a sense a disciple of
Schumann, went back and refused to do that. Is that because
Schumann was less of a perfectionistf
Perhaps so. And then one thing I think one must realize is that Brahms
was very close to the Viennese tradition. In Vienna there’s a tradition
of horn playing — as there is with the woodwinds, the oboe for instance
— that is still very strong today. The horn players in Vienna today still
play with their own technique. So does the oboist, and so do the brass
players generally. It’s true that Schumann was very much more ready
to accept new things; but perhaps Brahms was so used to this special
kind of sonority that it really was more difficult for him to change.

You’ve mentioned Brahms’s roots in tradition. For a conductor,

how far do you think that an affinity for Brahms — or for any
particular composer—is an innate thing? Do you think that it’s
related to nationality?
I should say there are two different aspects of this question. One is the
human element that is in your blood. You come from generations of
Italians or Slavs or some other ethnic tradition, and that character is
part of your nature — this is one thing. The other thing is the possibility
of developing your own nature to comprehend, through experience and
assimilation, those elements that belong to another nature.
I can only answer this from the example of my personal case. I
am Italian, of course. At the age of four I went to live in the part of Italy
 223
Carlo Maria Giulini on Brahms

which before the First World War was Austria—in the Dolomites, in South
Tirol, the region of Merano and Bolzano. So at the age of four I started
not only to speak the language but to live a tradition of a region of Aus¬
tria, where the dress, the architecture, the music, the dance, the songs
were a part of life. Now, in all Austrian music—in Haydn, in Mozart,
in Beethoven, and so on, in Bruckner, in Mahler (who came from Bo¬
hemia to Austria) —you find this same popular element, the Landler,
the Walzer, the popular songs, that belong to my youth, to my life. When
I first went to Vienna and played this kind of music, the folk style was
absolutely normal for me, because in the small villages the brass bands
used to play this music, with its characteristic rhythm, and the songs
and the beer were all part of the open-air fiesta that I grew up with.
This is one kind of assimilation. Then there are all the other
ways you can learn. At the time I was in Rome, the Augusteum Or¬
chestra was one of the finest orchestras in the world. One of the high
points of every conductor’s or soloist’s tour was an appearance at the
Augusteo, the concert hall in Rome which later became the Academy
of Santa Cecilia. It was a round hall, with an unbelievable atmosphere.
Then somebody put it in the brain of Mussolini that below
the hall was the tomb of Augustus, and so Mussolini said, “Ah, well,
destroy the hall —we have to find the tomb of Augustus.” They de¬
stroyed it and found only stones. They demolished one of the most
beautiful concert halls, one with the greatest tradition, to find nothing,
and now, still now, Rome is without a concert hall. You can’t imagine
such a thing. For forty years the orchestra went like a band of gypsies
and played in different theaters, the Teatro Argentino for instance,
and the Teatro Adriano, and now they play in a hall that they rent
from the Vatican.
In any case, this Augusteum Orchestra was one important
part of my life. When I started there I was not yet sixteen years old. You
can imagine —in the first years, listening, and then being a part of this
orchestra. There was no great conductor, and no great soloist, that
didn’t perform with us. I was a young man, studying composition and
playing in a string quartet. And then you can imagine the experience,
like drinking fresh water from the spring: being a member of the or¬
chestra for years, playing the Beethoven symphonies, the Brahms sym¬
phonies, with Furtwangler, with Bruno Walter, with Klemperer, then
with de Sabata. It’s something that starts to be a part of your body.
At this point one can speak of nationality. Perhaps a Russian
musician will have a different conception of a Tchaikovsky symphony.
 224
Conductors on Conducting

But I feel that a great Russian soloist or conductor will play a Beetho¬
ven concerto, will conduct a Brahms symphony just as well. Of course, it
can be that your own personality imparts something that is different.
But I think this is a good thing, because music is so great that you must
give it everything that is in you —your knowledge, of course, but also
your soul, your heart—so that it really is part of your life.
This is as true of time as it is of place. I would say that a com¬
poser’s work is as great as it is because it resists the changes of interpre¬
tation that happen automatically. There is no doubt that we today feel
differently from the people a hundred years ago, and the next century
will feel differently again —but Bach is still Bach. The composers that
are boxed in their own period have disappeared, because they don’t
resist change. Their level is more that of fashion than of true art. Of
course it’s impossible today to go around dressed like a hundred years
ago —nobody does, it would look strange — and in the same way there
are painters and writers and musicians who are locked within the bor¬
ders of their time. The great composers are different.
If you listen to old recordings, you hear interpretations that
sometimes sound absolutely crazy. If a pianist now played in the man¬
ner of Paderewski, or even Rachmaninoff, we couldn’t accept it today.
Remember that it was normal, absolutely normal, to change the sequence
of the movements of a Beethoven symphony. They played the Lar-
ghetto of the Second Symphony in the Fourth Symphony—that was
nothing—or they played a single movement of a symphony in a con¬
cert. Today that would be unthinkable.
Perhaps there is something to the question of nationality. I think
it is impossible for a person who has never been to Italy to take a score
of Verdi and study it the way he studies Mozart. It doesn’t matter where
he was born, it could be the North Pole. But it’s important to come to
breathe the air in Italy, to listen, to see what the theaters are like, to
speak with Italian conductors, to listen to Italian singers—to try to eat
this bread. It’s not just what you were born with; it’s what you have
contact with, what you take an interest in, what you imbibe from the
world. But it’s very easy for an Italian conductor to be a horrible con¬
ductor of Verdi. It’s possible to make a big mistake on this subject. To
me, what is important is to assimilate the atmosphere as much as I can.
I went to Prague for the first time in 1952, and I visited a folk
festival, with people in costume and dancing. And seeing this —not
looking at it as “folklore,” but really participating in a popular festival,
seeing the dances, the movement, the faces, the smiles —I can under-
 225
Carlo Maria Giulini on Brahms

stand so much about these people, much more than from reading thou¬
sands of books or studying a score. One thing that I will never forget is
this smile that is intense in the girls’ faces —and the eyes are sad, mel¬
ancholy. This great civilization —it’s one of the most beautiful cities
that you can imagine —is filled with this mixture of great violent rhy¬
thm and of morbidezza, soft movement, and in Dvorak, you know,
you find so much of this mixture of tenerezza and tristezza, of tender¬
ness and melancholy.

Like Marcel Marceau’s Maker of Masks, who gets the laughing

mask stuck on his face, while his body movements become
more and more distraught.
Exactly. And then a conductor needs a degree of self-criticism about
these matters of assimilation. Perhaps this is a poor example: I like good
jazz very much, but I know that this is something that I couldn’t do.
When I was very young I conducted a Gershwin program, and then I
said “No more” —I adore Gershwin, I love his music, but I cannot do
it. It’s something that really doesn’t belong to my nature —my human
nature or my cultural nature.
Yet the same can be true for me with certain Italian com¬
posers. I love and admire Puccini, but I cannot conduct Puccini. When
I was younger I did La Rondine, but that’s all. If you ask me why, I’ve
no answer. De Sabata said to me, “You must do Puccini operas: The
Girl of the Golden West, this is for you.” Of course I knew La fanciulla
del West, but I had never studied it to conduct it, which is a completely
different problem. So I took the score and went home, and I started to
study it not just to know the score but to be the performer, the inter¬
preter. And, you know, in one month I changed my nature to the point
of going mad, so much so that my wife said to me, “Go to de Sabata
and give him the score back, otherwise I don’t know how you will
end.” I took the score and when I saw him at La Scala I said, “I’m ter¬
ribly sorry, I cannot do it.” I went out the door, and I was myself again.
I must tell you that this was one of the most difficult experiences of my
musical life. I had the feeling of living with a person with whom I could
not make contact—who lived inside me, because I was studying him,
and I wanted him to come inside, but I couldn’t let him — my nature re¬
fused him. It was like rejecting a transplant. And I love Puccini. When
I listen to his music I love it and I enjoy it. But I cannot conduct it. Many
non-Italian conductors, on the other hand, conduct very beautiful
Puccini and beautiful Verdi and Rossini —why not?
 226
Conductors on Conducting

I don’t think there really are frontiers, that people start to be

Italian at the Brenner Pass and German at another point, and so on. I
believe strongly that what is important is to be deeply involved in some¬
thing, to know, to have the feeling. Not just to know, but to breathe
the air, the culture, the humanity. It’s important in Vienna to go into
one of those Gasthauses near the city and to drink the wine or the
beer, to go to the forest where Beethoven walked, and to see the small
houses where Schubert lived. In the same way, with Italy, to go to Par¬
ma, to hear how the people speak, to absorb their accent, to see how
they move, how they react.

And all this goes into the music?

Everything goes into the music, just as my experience in Czechoslo¬
vakia is now somewhere in my performance of Dvorak. There are
some things that it is impossible to study through the intellect. They
are in the air, so you have to breathe them. And if you do that, then, to
me, it isn’t important where you come from.
 227
Carlo Maria Giulini on Brahms

Giulini’s most remarkable Brahms recording so far, of the Fourth Sym¬

phony with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Angel, was made in
1969. A concert performance of the work, during his first four-week
spell as Principal Guest Conductor of the orchestra, had drawn reviews
of unanimous enthusiasm in all four of the city’s newspapers — and, as
one of the four critics concerned, I can testify that such complete agree¬
ment was rare. As a result, when the scheduled recording of works by
Berlioz and Stravinsky was finished with a session to spare, that single
session was used to tape the Brahms. If the result narrowly misses the in¬
candescence of the concert performance, I still find it the finest Brahms
Fourth on record, and an object lesson in the kind of unobtrusively
cogent tempo modification Giulini advocates.
The slightly earlier recording of the Third Symphony with the
Philharmonia Orchestra on Seraphim, though in my view flawed by the
omission of the first-movement repeat, is a scarcely less impressive inter¬
pretation and is supplemented by a superb performance of the Tragic
Overture. Neither record is, as I write in 1979, available in England ex¬
cept as an import, and the powerful collaboration with Alexis Weissen-
berg in the First Piano Concerto has also disappeared from the British
catalogues. Conversely, the glorious 1961 St. Antoni Variations with
the Philharmonia, reissued early in 1979 on the HM V Concert Classics
label, cannot at present be bought in the United States. Giulini’s partner¬
ships with Claudio Arrau in the two piano concertos and with Itzhak
Perlman in the violin concerto are current on both sides of the Atlantic
— the Arrau discs on Seraphim/Classics for Pleasure and the Perlman
on Deutsche Grammophon. All are excellent.
 Index

Academy of Santa Cecilia St. John Passion, 67, 69

[Rome], 223 St. Matthew Passion, 16, 61-62,

Albanese, Licia, 40 67, 69, 81, 83, 91

Albinoni, Tommaso, 115 Suites, 53, 69, 93

American Symphony Orches¬ Bacquier, Gabriel, 40

tra [New York], 160,165 Baker, Dame Janet, 148, 149

Ansermet, Ernest, 26 Bantock, Sir Granville, 206

Arrau, Claudio, 227 Barbieri, Fedora, 40

Ashton, Sir Frederick, 205 Barenboim, Daniel, 23

Augusteo [Rome], 223 Bartok, Bela, 136

Augusteum Orchestra, 223 Concerto for Orchestra, 24

Beecham, Sir Thomas, 25, 77,

136, 176

BBC Scottish Orchestra, 103 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 15,17,

BBC Symphony Orchestra, 103, 21, 65, 85, 90, 91, 105, 108,127,

193 129, 130,143,177, 216, 219, 221,

Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel, 14, 223, 224

86 Eroica Symphony, 51, 54, 63, 65,

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 14, 105, 110

47-69* 77, 83* 88, 106,134,135, Fidelio, 91

143, 176, 216 Fifth Symphony, 24, 25-26, 112,

Art of the Fugue, 180 113-114, 202

B Minor Mass, 64, 67, 69, 83, 88, Fourth Symphony, 219, 224

Ninth Symphony, n, 81, in,

93
Brandenburg Concertos, 53 147-148

Cantatas, 19, 66, 67, 69 Pastoral Symphony, 21, 202

Christmas Oratorio, 69 Second Symphony, 21, 199, 224

Concertos, 25, 69 Seventh Symphony, 106, 112

Easter Oratorio, 93 String quartets, 36

229
 230

Violin Concerto, 24, 66, 118 Fourth Symphony, 215, 218,

Beigel, Victor, 192 219, 220, 221, 227

Beinum, Eduard van, 128,130, German Requiem, 65, 215-216

140 Haydn Variations, 215, 227

Berg, Alban, 127,133 Second Piano Concerto, 133

Wozzeck, 40 Second Symphony, 109, 200,

Berger, Erna, 42 218, 220

Berlioz, Hector, 16, 18, 20, 24, Third Symphony, 46, 142, 218,

35, 65, 90, 99-119 227

Benvenuto Cellini, 115 Tragic Overture, 221, 227

Damnation of Faust, The, 109, Violin Concerto, 178

no, 118 Violin sonatas, 133

Fantastic Symphony, 24-25, 106, Bravington, Eric, 173

108, 109,114,118 Britten, Benjamin

Harold in Italy, 106, 118 Frank Bridge Variations, 85

Nuits d’ete, 112, 118 Sea Interludes, 85

Requiem, 24, iio-m, 115, 118 Serenade, 221

Romeo and Juliet, 107, 108, Bruckner, Anton, 24, 107,

in, 112, 118 114-115,127,134, 136, 137,138,

Trojans, The, 106, in, 115, 118 143, 146, 177, 223

Bernstein, Leonard, 17, no, Eighth Symphony, 146

151, 161 Seventh Symphony, 107, 117

Biber, Heinrich, 14 Bulow, Hans von, 16, 20, 24

Bliss, Sir Arthur, 195 Burney, Charles, 19
Bloch, Ernest Busch, Adolph, 53
Macbeth, 172 Busch, Fritz, 23
Bohm, Karl, 147 Bustini, Alessandro, 213
Borodin, Alexander, 135
Boston Symphony Orchestra,

x7> 119, ,
157 175 Cage, John, 169
Boulez, Pierre, 17, 164 Capuana, Franco, 40
Boult, Sir Adrian, 22, 138, Carnegie Hall [New York],
185-207 139,161
Brahms, Johannes, 53, 65, 105, Casa, Lisa della, 42
131,134, 143, 177,180, 191,192, Casella, Alfredo, 213
199-200, 209-227 Chicago Symphony Orchestra,
Academic Festival Overture, 142 16,166, 213, 227
First Piano Concerto, 200, 227 Cimarosa, Domenico, 87
 231

Clement, Franz, 24 Dream of Gerontius, The, 204,

Cleva, Fausto, 40 207
Cleveland Orchestra, 139-140, Enigma Variations, 134,192,
166 201, 205-206, 207
Collegium Aureum [Stuttgart], Falstaff, 194, 205, 207
63 First Symphony, 117, 193, 194,
Coliseum [London], 115 195-198, 201, 205
Cologne Opera, 177 Kingdom, The, 205, 207
CONCENTUS Musicus [VIENNA], Second Symphony, 117, 191, 192,

*5, 5i 193-195, 198-199, 204, 207

CONCERTGEBOUW [AMSTERDAM], Serenade for Strings, 207

115, I27, 139 Third Symphony, 206

CONCERTGEBOUW ORCHESTRA, Violin Concerto, 117

Il8, 125, 129, 139, 140, 151 Elwes, Gervase, 192

Cooke, Deryck, 151 English National Opera, 75

Corelli, Arcangelo, 14 See also Sadler’s Wells Opera

Fabritiis, Oliviero de, 40

Dante, 112
Falla, Manuel de, 135
Davis, Colin, 22, 25, 26, 75,
Ferrier, Kathleen, 142-143
99-X19, 141
Fleischer Collection [Philadel¬
Debussy, Claude
phia], 160, 162,163,175
La Mer, 220
Flesch, Carl, 95-96
Nocturnes, 220
Flipse, Eduard, 128
Pelleas et Melisande, 117
Fontanne, Lynn, 39
Delius, Frederick
Forkel, Johann, 14
Violin Concerto, 181
Forsyth, Cecil, 197
Del Mar, Norman, 112
Free Trade Hall [Manchester],
Domingo, Placido, 40
139
Donizetti, Gaetano, 105
Furtwangler, Wilhelm, 17, 23,
Dorati, Antal, 17
26, 42, 66, 94,105, 200, 218, 223
Dorian, Frederick, 9
Dvorak, Antonin, 225, 226

Gedda, Nicolai, 107

Gershwin, George, 225

Elgar, Carice, 206 Gillesberger, Hans, 83-84

Elgar, Sir Edward, 117, 185-207 Giordano, Umberto, 35

 232

Giulini, Carlo Maria, zi, 94, Haydn, Joseph, 14, 35, 77, 82,

134,191, 209-227 106,132, 223

Gluck, Christoph Willibald, Oxford Symphony, 106
18,19,106,107 Henze, Hans Werner, 17
Orfeo, 107 Holland Festival, 130
Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Holst, Gustav

125 Planets, The, no

Gobbi, Tito, 43 Honegger, Arthur, 135
Goodman, Benny, 78 Pacific 231, 170
Graun, Carl Heinrich, 87 Houston Symphony Orchestra,

Grumiaux, Arthur, 118 159-160

Huddersfield Town Hall, 139

Habeneck, Francois-Antoine,

15,16, 24 Issac, Heinrich, 135

Hague Philharmonic Orches¬ Ives, Charles, 153-183
tra, 128 Celestial Country, The, 169
Haitink, Bernard, 22,119, Celestial Railroad, The, 167
121-151,182 Central Park in the Dark, 164
Halle Orchestra [Manchester], Concord Piano Sonata, 168
167 Decoration Day, 166, 175, 176
Hamburg State Opera, 75 First String Quartet, 168
Handel, George Frideric, 14, First Symphony, 169
18, 56, 71-97,176 Fourth Symphony, 157, 159 et seq.
Belshazzar, 69 Gunther Schuller version, 163,
Fireworks Music, 80, 82, 97 174-175
Israel in Egypt, 94, 97 From the Steeples and the Moun¬
Judas Maccabeus, 97 tains, 180
Messiah, 63, 79, 80-81, 86, 88, Holidays Symphony, 166, 167,
89, 9°> 93 > 95> 97; Mozart’s re¬ 170
orchestration, 25, 79-80, 97 Second Symphony, 170, 176
Solomon, 25 Unanswered Question, The, 166,
Water Music, 97 180
Xerxes, 95
Harnoncourt, Nikolaus, 19,
20, 25, 47-69, 83-84 Janacek, Leos, 75, 90, 91
Hasse, Johann Adolph, 87 Jazz, 78, 225
 233

Joachim, Joseph, 143 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 13,18

Jochum, Eugen, 125, 140 Lunt, Alfred, 39
Josephs, Wilfred
Requiem, 165
Josquin, 106 Mackerras, Sir Charles, ii, 18,

19, 7i-97
Maderna, Bruno, 17
Karajan, Herbert von, 91, 127 Mahler, Gustav, 17, 22, 26, 35,
Katowice Radio-Television Phil¬ 46, 60, 65,114-115, 116, 121-151,
harmonic, 177, 178 170, 176-177, 218, 223
Kempe, Rudolf, 117 Eighth Symphony, 116
Kennedy, Michael, 204 Fifth Symphony, 116, 129-130,
King, James, 151 131, 132, 136, 146
Klemperer, Otto, 17, 94, 223 First Symphony, 129, 130, 144,
Koussevitzsky, Serge, 18 i45*i46, 149, I5G I7I
Krauss, Clemens, 117 Fourth Symphony, 128, 129,
Kuijken Ensemble [Amsterdam], 141, 171
51 Klagende Lied, Das, 151
Kullman, Charles, 127 Knaben Wunderhorn, Des, 116
Ninth Symphony, 128, 139, 142,
146
Lanchbery, John, 205 Riickert songs, 151
Lang, Paul Henry, 9, 19 Second Symphony, 128, 129,
La Scala [Milan], 213 144, 170
Leeds Festival, 194 Seventh Symphony, 146
Leipzig Gewandhaus Orches¬ Sixth Symphony, 128, 146
tra, 16 Song of the Earth, The, 116,
Leonhardt, Gustav, 69 127, 140, 142-143, 146, 148,
Levi, Hermann, 16 149, 150, 151
Levine, James, 17, 29-46,193 Tenth Symphony, 151, 206,
Liszt, Franz, 16, 96 Third Symphony, 128, 132, 141,
London Philharmonic Orches¬ 145, 146, 171
tra, 125, 139, i73'I74» 177-178, Mahler Society, 146
191, 207 Marceau, Marcel, 225
London Symphony Orchestra, Martinon, Jean, 17, 24
12, 118 Mascagni, Pietro, 35
Los Angeles Philharmonic, 138 May Festival [Cincinnati], 33
 234

Mehta, Zubin, 138 Thirty-fourth Symphony, 141

Mendelssohn, Felix, 16, 57, 109 Muck, Karl, 17

Elijah, 15 Munch, Charles, 25, in
Italian Symphony, 118, 141 Munvies, Peter, 171-172,173,
Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 176

118 Mussolini, Benito, 223

Mengelberg, Willem, 22, 127,
141-142,144, 147

Menuhin, Yehudi, 66
NBC Symphony, 40-41
Metropolitan Opera [New
Nabokov, Vladimir, 44
York], 16, 33
Nelli, Herva, 40
Miller, Glenn, 78
New Philharmonla Orchestra
Molinari, Bernardino, 213
[London], 172, 202
Monteux, Pierre, 114,134,140,
New York Philharmonic, 16
165,192
Nielsen, Carl, 116
Monteverdi, Claudio, 69
Nikisch, Arthur, 12,16, 26,189,
Mottl, Felix, 16
191,193,194
Mozart, Leopold, 43
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus,
14,18, 29-46, 66, 75, 77, 82, 87,
Ornithoparcus, Andreas, 13
105, 107-108, 115, 127, 130,182,
Otterloo, Willem van, 129
216, 221, 223
Ozawa, Seiji, 157,175,179
Abduction from the Seraglio,
The, 42

Cost fan tutte, 42

Don Giovanni, 42, 82, 86-87, Paderewski, Ignace Jan, 224

131; Wagner’s revised version, Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi
24 da, 106
Fortieth Symphony, 140 Parry, Sir Hubert, 203, 204-205
Haffner Symphony, 88 Songs of Farewell, 204
Idomeneo, in Patzak, Julius, 149
Marriage of Figaro, The, 38, Perlman, Itzhak, 227

4ij 95 Philharmonla Orchestra

Oboe Quartet, 68 [London], 227
Reorchestration of Handel’s Preston, Simon, 94
Messiah, 25, 79-80, 97 Previn, Andre, 17
Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Pritchard, John, 167
Viola, and Orchestra, 25 Prokofiev, Sergei, 182
 235

Third Symphony, 198 Sadler’s Wells Opera [Lon¬

Puccini, Giacomo, 35, 43, 84, 225 don], 103,112
Fanciulla del West, La, 225 See also English National Opera
Rondine, La, 225 St. Paul’s [London], 115
Pushkin, Alexander, 44 Salomon, Johann Peter, 14,
82
Salomonis, Elias, 13
Salzburg Festival, 33
Quantz, Johann Joachim, 86
Samuel, Harold, 200
Satie, Erik, 19-20
Schindler, Anton, 21,199
Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 224
Schoenberg, Arnold, 23-24,169,
Rameau, Jean-Philippe
171
Castor et Pollux, 69
Variations, 85
Ravel, Maurice, 134,166
SCHONBERG, HAROLD C., 9, 22, l6l
Daphnis et Chloe Second Suite,
Schubert, Franz, 35, 105,129,
174, 178
132,135,182, 202, 216
Ravinia Festival [Chicago], 33
Great C Major Symphony, 16,
Reed, W. H., 206
138, 199, 202-203
Reger, Max, 189
Unfinished Symphony, 203
Reichardt, Johann Friedrich, 15
Schumann, Clara, 65
Reiner, Fritz, 23
Schumann, Robert, 65,147, 222
Reith, Lord, 206
Concertstiick for Four Horns,
Richter, Hans, 16, 204
222
Rossini, Gioacchino, 105
Schuricht, Carl, 128, 129
Rotterdam Philharmonic Or¬
Schutz, Heinrich, 106
chestra, 128
Schwarz, Rudolf, 201
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 13
Seidl, Anton, 16
Royal Albert Hall [London], 116
Serafin, Tullio, 40
Royal Festival Hall [London],
Serebrier, Jose, 153-183
115,139, 195 Elegy for Strings, 160
Royal Opera House, Covent
First Symphony, 159
Garden [London], 103, 115,
Partita, 172
117,125 Serkin, Rudolf, 53
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
Shaw, George Bernard, 77
[London], 173 Shore, Bernard, 21, 191
Sibelius, Jean, 22,108,116,
119, i96
Sabata, Victor de, 40, 223, 225 Siepi, Cesare, 40
 236

Societe des Concerts du Con¬ PathStique Symphony, 95

servatoire de Paris, 15 Teatro Adriano [Rome], 223

Solti, Sir Georg, 103, no, 117, Teatro Argentino [Rome], 223

i93 Telemann, Georg Philipp, 55-56,

Spark, William, 15 69

Spengler, Oswald, 57 Thomas, Theodore, 16

Spohr, Ludwig, 15 Thomson, Virgil, 161
Spontini, Gasparo, 15,16 Thorborg, Kerstin, 127
Steber, Eleanor, 42 Three Choirs Festival, 194
Stefano, Giuseppe di, 40 Tippett, Sir Michael, 203
Steinberg, William, iio Toscanini, Arturo, 19, 21-23, 26>
Stokowski, Leopold, 17,157 etseq. 39-4i, 43, 46, 65, 77, 84, 105, 200
Strauss, Richard, 17, 20, 21, 37, Tovey, Sir Donald, 19
65, in, 147, 191
Don Juan, 140
Elektra, no, 117 Vaughan, Denis, 202
Rosenkavalier, Der, 37, 40 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 192,
Salome, 37 201
Stravinsky, Igor, 17, 22, 53, London Symphony, A, 197
112-113, 115-116, 168,169, 182 Verdi, Giuseppe, 20, 29-46, 85,
Oedipus Rex, 112 92, 105, 107, 224
Rite of Spring, The, 36, 85-86, Ballo in maschera, Un, 37
165, 174, 175, 177 Don Carlo, 43
Symphony in C, 116 Ealstaff, 38-39, 40, 43, 105, 181

Symphony in Three Movements, Forza del destino. La, 40, 46

116 Giovanna d’Arco, 46

Symphony of Psalms, 113 Otello, 37, 40, 43, 44-45, 46, in

Sydney Symphony Orchestra, 75 Requiem, 37, 40

Symphony Hall [Boston], 115,139 Rigoletto, 37

Szell, George, 22, 23, 24, 33, Traviata, La, 40-41, 95

139-141, 202 Vespri siciliani, I, 37, 46

Vickers, Jon, 44-45

Vienna Musikverein, 139, 220
Talich, Vaclav, 75 Vienna Philharmonic, 138,147
Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilyich, 108, Vinay, Ramon, 40
180,182 Vivaldi, Antonio, 14, 61
Fifth Symphony, 12 Concerto in B Minor, op. 3,

Manfred Symphony, 172, 174 no. 10, 25

 237

Concertos op. 8, 67 Walter, Bruno, 18, 77,127,128,

Four Seasons, The, 67, 69 142, 202, 223
Votto, Antonino, 40 Weber, Carl Maria von, 15-16,

21, 106,107
Freischutz, Der, 107
Wagner, Richard, 12,16,17,18, Weingartner, Felix, 12,17,

22-23, *6, 36-37, 94, 96, 107, 20-21, 24, 26, 109
109,180,191 Weissenberg, Alexis, 227

Lohengrin, yj Wenzinger, August, 53

Revised version of Mozart’s Don Williamson, Malcolm, 195

Giovanni, 24 Wood, Sir Henry, 204

Tristan und Isolde, 40, 106, 107,

hi

Walkiire, Die, 37 Zemlinsky, Alexander von, 23

Bernard Jacobson’s writings are known throughout the music
world. He was born in London and was educated at City of Lon¬
don School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he took a
degree in philosophy and ancient history but spent almost all of the
time he ought to have devoted to study in listening to, singing, and
writing about music and in editing a university magazine. His
history tutor said later, “I always knew you had another line, so
there seemed little point in making a fuss.”
His career has taken him from England to Holland, where
he worked for Philips Records, and to the United States. His ar¬
ticles and criticisms have been published in the London Times,
Manchester Guardian, Opera, The Listener, Music and Musicians,
Records and Recording in England and in Saturday Review, High
Fidelity, Opera News, Stereo Review, and other publications in the
United States. Mr. Jacobson was the Music Critic of the Chicago
Daily News for six years. While there, he held teaching posts at the
University of Chicago and Roosevelt University.
He returned to England in 1973 and spent the next years
working with arts associations. He now lives with his wife and two
children in Wymondham, Norfolk, and he contributes regularly to
many prestigious American and English periodicals. He is also the
author of The Music of Johannes Brahms.
S. MARK TERM AN
(continued from front flap)
with these conductors, many other important aspects
of performance creation emerge, such as the use of
ornamentation and continuo technique in Baroque
music discussed brilliantly and succinctly by Charles
Mackerras and Nikolaus Harnoncourt; the problems
of performance editions which Bernard Haitink and
Jose Serebrier raise; and questions of style, tempo,
latitude of interpretation, ethnic elements, and
rehearsal technique. Many other fascinating points
are probed here in a human, open, non-technical
fashion.
Conductors on Conducting offers crystal-clear
insights into the world of the performer and inter¬
preter of music. It is a brilliant exposition of musical
performance for the music lover from the points of
view of these gifted and lucid conductors. With an
introduction that explores the history of conducting.

Bernard Jacobson is a music critic who has written

criticism and major articles for the most important
American and English newspapers and magazines.
He was born in London and was educated at Corpus
Christi College, Oxford. For six years he was the
Music Critic of the Chicago Daily News. He lectures
extensively on music in England and the United
States. His work has appeared in the London Times,
Manchester Guardian, Saturday Review, High Fi¬
delity, Stereo Review, Musical Times, Opera, Melos,
the new Grove’s Dictionary, Britannica 3, Opera
News, and many other books and magazines. He is
the author of The Music of Johannes Brahms. Mr.
Jacobson lives with his wife and two children in
Wymondham, Norfolk, England.
Some Advance Comments
DRS on
There are few writers on music today Who get so inside the
music without becoming unreadably technical as Bernard
Jacobson. There are few writers as w^ll who balance enthu¬
siasm and equanimity to such a fine-tuned point. Jacobson’s
conversations with conductors make up a rare sort of book
indeed: intelligent and elegant writing in a field that has seen
little enough of either.
James Goodfriend, Music Editor, Stereo Review

Bernard Jacobson is a sensitive musician and a fine writer. His

music criticisms have earned him an international reputation
which is well deserved. His knowledge of the repertoire is as
vast as his understanding of it profound.
H. C. Robbins Landon

hile it may not be rare for a conductor to shoot off his mouth,
it is certainly rare for an interviewer to be able to get him to
aim at musically significant targets. This, Bernard Jacobson,
as musically knowledgeable and astute as his partners in these
conversations, has done brilliantly. Many bullseyes here
Leonard Marcus, Editor-in-Chief, High Fidelity