The Life and Death of Classical Music (24 page)

The most performed concert work by any American composer is Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, a reinstrumentation of the second movement of his B minor string quartet that became, at President Roosevelt’s funeral, the nation’s music of commemoration, and, in Oliver Stone’s film
Platoon
, its lament for the Vietnam War.

Barber (1910–81) was an outmoded romantic who belonged in patrician style and gesture to an American pastoral that preceded two world wars and the onset of modernism. Unstintingly melodic, he wrote in long, arching lines that contradicted the jagged urban rhythms of Copland and Bernstein, his close contemporaries, let alone the austerities of atonalism.

Brought up within earshot of his aunt, the famed contralto Louise Homer, Barber wrote fluently for female voices. Knoxville, to a text by James Agee (scriptwriter of
The African Queen)
, was unapologetically nostalgic, a snapshot of a quiet evening in a Tennessee small town, a bored small boy lying on the rough wet grass listening to ‘a streetcar raising its iron moan’. The soprano
Eleanor Steber, who commissioned the work, said ‘that was exactly my childhood’ and sang the 1948 premiere in Boston. She went on to make the first recording as the march of time quickened and ‘parents on porches’ were to be seen no more. Curatorially, this warmly engaging, crisply articulated recording is prime American heritage, as precious as the Liberty Bell.

The ‘Swedish Caruso’ died, like his namesake, some months short of his fiftieth birthday, the victim of aggressive alcohol abuse. Decca producer John Culshaw, visiting him early one morning at his Rome hotel during sessions for Un Ballo in Maschera, found Björling halfway through a second whisky bottle. Culshaw promptly replaced him with Carlo Bergonzi.

Astonishingly, though his health was wrecked by the addiction, his voice was unimpaired. At Covent Garden the summer before he died he suffered a heart attack on stage but insisted, after a half-hour delay, on resuming the role. His secret was a phenomenal breathing technique and the patience to wait until his prime before tackling the biggest roles.

Trained by his tenor father and touring with three brothers as a family quartet, his career was stalled by the Second World War and when his fame took off in the 1950s he tried to make up for lost time by grabbing money gigs and spending wildly. At work on the opera stage, though, he was consummately professional, impressing colleagues as sceptical as Maria Callas with his sensitive phrasing. Some of the best tracks he cut were duets. Paired with the Met baritone Robert Merrill, Björling recorded a Pearl Fishers duet that has never been equalled, along with twosomes from Forza and Boheme-and the marbled heavens oath scene from Otello, a summit role that he was planning to sing for the first time
in the season of his premature death. The power of these duets is not so much in the singing as in the listening. Björling, for all his fame and power, is audibly intent upon his partner’s every half-breath, as if joined in the act of love.

There have been many historic Ninths on record. There was Leonard Bernstein, at the fall of the Berlin Wall, substituting the cry of Freiheit (freedom) for Freude (joy). Karajan’s 1962 Berlin LP, just after the Wall went up, is the all-time best-selling Ninth. Wilhelm Furtwängler gave a momentous performance for the post-war reopening of Bayreuth. Felix Weingartner, a friend of Brahms, engraved a truly authentic style in two recordings of 1926 and 1935.

But of all recorded Ninths, and there are around sixty, one takes precedence for its furious energy and faith in human goodness. Toscanini had been conducting the Ninth for exactly half a century when he entered Carnegie Hall for what he intended as a significant valediction. When he first conducted the work in Milan in 1902, the city had heard it only three times before. Now the Ninth was not only the most familiar of masterpieces but also the most meaningful, a signal of hope after the ravages of war. Toscanini had played it at the reconsecration of La Scala in 1946; here he presented it as a cultural jewel to be passed to future generations.

The first two movements are breathtakingly fast, the Adagio engagingly taut and gloriously warm-toned. The Robert Shaw Chorus and all-American quartet in the finale-Eileen Farrell, Nan Merriman, Jan Peerce and Norman Scott-err on the side of might, threatening to burst their lungs, but the pacing is supple and the heat intense. Amid the bombast, one hears islands of intimacy and calm. Taped in Carnegie Hall in preference to NBC’s cramped studio, the sound is vivid. ‘I am almost satisfied,’ said
Toscanini at playback, adding after a moment’s reflection, ‘I still don’t understand that music’

For a small nation the Czechs are notably over-endowed with great composers, but the symphony that stirs them most comes from a minor master. Joseph Suk was a violinist who married Dvorák’s daughter, Otilie. When his father-in-law died in May 1904, Suk dutifully started a requiem, naming it after the angel, Asrael, who accompanies souls to paradise. In the middle of the fourth movement, Otilie fell sick; she died in July 1905. He tore up the Adagio and wrote a new one: To Otilka.

Asrael is a double lament, an entombment of hope. Muted in grief, restrained in rage, the symphony would embody for Czechs all that they were unable to express during two world wars and foreign occupations. In the Nazi camp of Theresienstadt and the Soviet labour camps, oppressed composers quoted themes from Asrael to sustain the doomed souls around them.

The glory of the work is that it refuses to become mired in misery and escapes quickly into the uplands of recovery. A successful soloist and chamber musician, Suk knew the classical repertoire well enough to quote deftly from Verdi, Beethoven, Brahms and, inevitably, Dvorák. But the piece avoids patchwork and its finale, a loving portrait of Otilie, reworks Brucknerian textures in wholly original ways.

Vaclav Talich, Suk’s close friend, conducted the Czech Philharmonic from 1919 to 1941. Like Wilhelm Furtwängler in Berlin, he stayed put during the Hitler years and suffered for it afterwards. The communists banished him to Bratislava, where he founded the Slovak Philharmonic. In the Stalinist darkness of 1952 he was brought back to Prague to conduct Asrael. Arrests were rife and
men were hanged on trumped-up treason charges. Underplaying the work’s emotions, Talich unfolded a noble account of national suffering and hope, a performance that captures a terrible moment and preserves its solemn dignity for all time.

This landmark recording was almost never made. Furtwängler, its conductor, told EMI that he would never work again with the scheming producer Walter Legge, whom he accused of sabotaging his career to promote Herbert von Karajan. Flagstad, the great Isolde, told the record company that she would not make the recording without Furtwängler, whom she trusted implicitly, or without Legge, whom she relied upon discreetly to substitute her missing two top Cs in Act Two with the voice of his wife, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. The impasse was insuperable and time was ticking loudly away. Flagstad was fifty-seven years old and had announced her retirement.

A compromise was found. Legge apologized to Furtwängler in writing for any hurt caused by ‘alleged’ remarks. The conductor, for his part, acknowledged the excellence of Legge’s London orchestra and waived his demands for a Berlin or Bayreuth recording. Casting was quickly settled. The Tristan and Brangane were second choices-Lauritz Melchior was found to be past it for Tristan and Martha Modl was about to sing Isolde for the unmentionable Karajan. Furtwängler inserted Suthaus, whom he had conducted as Tristan in 1947, and Flagstad recommended Thebom, an American of Swedish extraction whom she had taken under her wing. Both acquitted themselves well; Josef Greindl and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sang a fine King Mark and Kurwenal, but the limelight belonged to soprano and conductor.

Flagstad sang an Isolde to melt an iceberg, tender rather than
erotic, her love for Tristan deepened by maturity. Her sound fills space like floodwater, leaving no room for disbelief. Furtwängler, intellectually uncomfortable with the business of recording, had never conducted an opera in studio before. He disliked the basement-level hall and the noise of Central Line trains running beside it, but his performance was imbued with calm assurance and inspirational risk; his health was failing and he was anxious to leave an interpretative legacy.

When all was over, he put an arm round Legge’s shoulder and said: ‘My name will be remembered for this, but yours should be.’ Legge griped privately that this was the only compliment he ever got in forty recordings they made together. There were two hours left at the end of the final session and Legge suggested that Furtwängler should make use of the orchestra and hall to record Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer with Fischer-Dieskau. The conductor turned on him brusquely and said: ‘I promised you
Tristan
, and that’s all you’re getting.’ They never worked together again.

Renata Tebaldi was Nature’s antidote to Maria Callas. Restrained where the Greek raged, pure toned where Callas shrieked, she was adored by cognoscenti but never obtained equivalent celebrity. Thirty years old in this recording, Tebaldi had made her US debut as Aida in San Francisco in 1950 but was not called to New York for another five years, after which she became a Met fixture, the jewel in its crown after Rudolf Bing fired her tempestuous rival. While Callas was the media darling, Tebaldi was queen of the footlights, the serene ruler of illusion.

A year older than Callas, she never married nor slept with millionaires, she turned up on time at rehearsal and sang with relish. Her only obduracy was a refusal to sing non-Italian roles
or eat foreign food, deeming lesser tongues and cuisines to be uncultured.

Callas made headlines of their rivalry, asking journalists if they did not prefer her champagne to the Met’s Coca-Cola. Tebaldi replied that she found champagne rather sour. They carved up the opera summits. While Callas ruled La Scala, Tebaldi played Florence and Rome. Callas occupied Covent Garden, which Tebaldi boycotted as ‘a Callas house’. Beyond the hostility lay a sincere mutual respect.

This Aida was Tebaldi’s launchpad, a year ahead of the coming of Callas. It was also the first recording of the opera to sound like the real thing. Although constricted by mono sound, the Santa Cecilia hall gave a cavernous dimension to Verdi’s Egyptian desert and a choking claustrophobia to the climactic entombment. Despite forty degrees of heat and no air conditioning, Tebaldi sang without strain, soaring above huge choruses and dropping alternately to a whisper. She sang softer than any living spinto and although the huge Mario del Monaco was not an ideal vocal partner, the conductor, Alberto Erede, was the best balancer of singing voices. Many claim to prefer Tebaldi’s stereo Aida with Bergonzi and Karajan, but this performance has the virtues of freshness and daring. Nothing is held back and Stignani, often a foil to Callas, finds an altogether more credible persona opposite the luminous Tebaldi. Half a century later there was still no Aida (bar Tebaldi’s Karajan retake) to match this set.

The four last songs of Richard Strauss-a fifth turned up after the edition went to print-were premiered at the Royal Albert Hall on 22 May 1950, eight months after the composer’s death, by the phenomenal Kirsten Flagstad, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler (a radio tape can be found on the Norwegian label, Simax). Confusion
and controversy set in. Flagstad had sung the songs in the order Strauss wrote them, as falling leaves from a wintry oak. Boosey & Hawkes, the publishers, shuffled the order to open with upbeat Fruühling (Springtime).

Sena Jurinac sang the first commercial recording for EMI (Fritz Busch conducting in Stockholm) following the published order and with some interpretative uncertainty. Decca’s was the second recording, and it had extra merits. The orchestra was once Strauss’s own and the Swiss soprano Lisa della Casa possessed a vocal serenity which, more than Flagstad’s steely magnificence, evoked the singing voice of Strauss’s wife, Pauline, his lifelong inspiration. The conductor was Karl Bohm, a card-playing chum of the composer’s, and the mood was more sunny than commemorative. Tempi were brisk, the breathing natural.

Most conspicuously of all, the order in which the songs were sung differed both from Flagstad and from Boosey, beginning logically with Beim Schlafengehen (On Going to Sleep), a farewell by an uncomplicated artist looking back on a life he had relished to the full and was ready to relinquish with a smile. September came next, followed by Fruühling and finally Im Abendrot (At Dusk). Della Casa sang without operatic affectation, as if she were privately recalling a beloved grandfather, and the solos of the Vienna concertmaster, Wolfgang Schneiderhahn, have the sweetness of fond regret. The Decca producer was Victor Olof on the verge of a scandalous defection to EMI, and his balancing was exemplary for a late mono recording. Many singers have subsequently shone in this cycle-Schwarzkopf (Szell), Lucia Popp (Tennstedt), Jessye Norman (Masur), Karita Mattila (Abbado)-but Della Casa was first on record to give the songs credence and joy.