The Life and Death of Classical Music (33 page)

No pianist has ever taken the Busoni transcription of a Bach chorale so slowly, note by note, revealing its giant carapace, nor has anyone, the composer included, filled Rachmaninov’s G-sharp minor Prelude with such glassy foreboding. Mozart and Chopin are treated as if they were still alive, tormented romantics in a technological laboratory. Scriabin is played with the benefit of personal acquaintance and massive affection. When the producers pointed out a wrong note on playback, the pianist said: ‘I don’t want perfection. I’m not Heifetz. I’m Horowitz.’
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It was the closest this odd, introspective pianist ever came to artistic self-characterization.

The contrast between the two reigning tenors of the late twentieth century was pronounced. Domingo was a polyglot professional with 100 roles to his credit, the first singer of modern times to tackle Wagner’s heroes as well as French and Russian dramas. Luciano Pavarotti was an unsophisticated powerhouse who sang his own language in thirty operas and sold more records than Caruso.

Otello was Domingo’s defining role, the one Italian summit that he strutted above his arch-rival Pavarotti, who dodged the role until too late. Domingo took possession of the part as a young man in the early 1970s, a sultry Spaniard acting the Moor without face paint, singing with tenderness and venom. His marbl’d heavens duet with Iago was a surefire showstopper.

Domingo made four recordings of Otello-two with James Levine, in 1976 and 1996, the first too callow and the latter too knowing. At the midpoint between, he was about to film the opera with Franco Zeffirelli on location in Apulia when a terrible earthquake struck Mexico City, where much of his family lived. Friends and relatives were left injured and homeless. Domingo cancelled a year’s engagements to raise funds. I caught up with him on set, in a ruined castle at Barletta, southern Italy. Dust-caked and distracted, his helpless rage was channelled, when the cameras turned, into the fury of a conquering hero whose love for his wife is turned by a worm of jealousy. The rest of the casting was compromised. Katia Ricciarelli was a domestic celebrity, married to Italy’s leading chat-show host. Justino Diaz was an old pal of Domingo’s. Neither had the acting skills to bring Desdemona and Iago to life as, for example, Rysanek and Gobbi had done on EMI’s set, conducted by Serafin.

But Domingo was irresistibly Otello. At dawn on the ramparts overlooking the glassy Adriatic, or in a dungeon with the skulking Iago, his presence was awe-inspiring, a man transformed, transcending his private concerns. His second-scene cry Abasso le spade!’ (Lower your swords) ripples with heroic desperation. Off set, he was continuously on the phone to Mexico.

The sound recording hit a trail of snags. Carlos Kleiber ducked out after disagreements over casting. Lorin Maazel, his replacement, tried to persuade Zeffirelli to allow him to insert some Moorish incidental music that he had wishfully composed. The director told Ricciarelli that she was too fat. EMI switched its soundman at the last minute to a set of Classic Rock sessions in London. Despite the ructions, the recording was immaculate. ‘The battlements scene with Domingo and Ricciarelli was absolutely beautiful and I had never heard an opera chorus like La Scala’s,’ said sound engineer Tony Faulkner. Domingo contributed a sleeve note, venting the opinion that Otello ‘is for grown-up singers’. The shaft was aimed directly at Pavarotti’s playful midriff.

The tectonic plates of cultural history are heard shifting here. Arvo Part, a technician at Estonian Radio, was a philosophical individual who sought ways of using music as a means of resistance to the Soviet occupation of his country. He started composing twelve-note rows in the manner of Western atonalists and, when all that achieved was to get him banned, he turned to older sources. Profoundly religious, he drew upon the simplicities of medieval church music in his third symphony of 1973, dedicated to Neeme Jarvi, his country’s foremost conductor. Its monodic themes, set in Sibelian topography (Helsinki is a short hop across the Baltic from Tallinn), were ice-meltingly lovely, unpunishable by any communist criterion.

Part developed the style in a Cantata Symphony the following year and achieved an apotheosis of sorts when, in 1976, upon the death of Britten-a composer notorious for pro-Soviet sympathies-he wrote a short public eulogy for a colleague with whom he was unacquainted and out of sympathy. The Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten splits a string ensemble into separate halves, each side descending very slowly down the scale of A minor, to the tolling of a single bell. Its ethereality was both an antidote to the dialectical materialism of state communism and a solemn assertion of the dignity of the individual in a system that claimed to own all souls.

Across the world, unknown to Part, New Yorkers Steve Reich and Philip Glass were offering a parallel response to Western materialism in a form of repetitive minimalism. In Poland, Henryk Mikolai Gorecki was writing his ‘holy minimalist’ third symphony (CD 88, p. 261). In Britain, Michael Nyman turned from serialism to minimalism. Composers on both sides of the Cold War were thinking similar thoughts. Neeme Jarvi defected to Sweden with a repertory richer and more eclectic than any Western conductor.

He recorded Part on a small English label with a modest Scottish orchestra and no fanfare whatsoever. Cantus came out in a disc of music by Estonian composers. A year later, Soviet power collapsed and Estonia was set free.

George Gershwin’s tale of tough love among the underclasses was anathema to opera houses. Turned down by the snooty Met, it had a modest premiere in Boston in September 1935 and transferred to the Alvin Theater, on Broadway, for 124 nights. When the show lost its $70,000 investment, Gershwin lost heart. After his death in July 1937 Porgy hovered in limbo between commercial theatre and repertory opera, the establishment clinging to the first-night verdict by Olin Downes in the
New York Times
that ‘Mr Gershwin … has not completely formed his style as an opera composer.’

The Met considered Porgy for the 1976 US bicentennial year, but went cold on the idea for much the same reasons as before. Amends were finally made in February 1985 (Simon Estes and Grace Bumbry in the name roles), but it was the following summer, in a much unlikelier setting, that the work achieved universal recognition.

Simon Rattle, the rising British conductor, had been pestering Glyndebourne, the fat-cat summer festival, to engage with society red in tooth and claw. Trevor Nunn, head of the Royal Shakespeare Company and director of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, loved the Porgy story; Willard White and Cynthia Haymon took the title roles. Six weeks of rehearsal in the Sussex countryside was a festival of multiracial interaction in England’s green and pleasant. On opening night stuffed shirts dissolved into helpless tears and the Glyndebourne Chorus sounded like gospel. Rattle pinned the rhythms just right, between opera and honky-tonk, and there
wasn’t a weak link in the cast. Harolyn Blackwell’s Summertime was pitched so sweet and high it was practically out of her skin and Bruce Hubbard was deep in every sense as Jake. The perpetual motion of trains and ships about to leave is nervously innate to Rattle’s beat. This was an opera that was on its way. The recording, two years later in Abbey Road, struggled to recapture the original excitement but it nevertheless conveyed a moment in performing history when colour and class ceased to matter and artists and audience were brought together by their common humanity.

One of the most popular operas of the nineteenth century, La Juive fell out of rep because few modern houses could find or afford to pay three lyric tenors, each capable of carrying off a big scene. The opera is immense, well over four hours long, and its early influence was vast-not only on Berlioz, Gounod, Bizet and Saint-Saens, but on the impressionable young Richard Wagner, much as he despised its Jewish theme. It is an essential study score of the high noon of grand opera. Eleazar was the last role that Caruso sang on stage, at the Met, on Christmas Eve 1924.

With the rise of Nazism the work fell out of favour-its last Paris performance was in 1934-and when normality was restored it had been completely forgotten, but for a few scattered concert performances. Its absence irked the New York Friends of French Opera, a group that put on one-nighters at Carnegie Hall. Money was raised, and Erik Smith of Philips assembled a credible cast under Antonio de Almeida, probably the world’s foremost authority on French opera, owner of an unrivalled private library of first-edition scores (now at Trinity College, London).

De Almeida made some cuts to keep the costs manageable on three discs and split the session over three years and two venues to accommodate the busy diaries of its star performers. Despite these constraints, the performance is stylistically authentic and narratively compelling. Carreras, in prime voice, leads the tenorial pack; Julia Varady (Mrs Fischer-Dieskau), slightly too full and shrill, plays an epic heroine, forced to choose between her faith and her life. The set pieces are wonderfully rendered, never better than in Eleazar’s rapt prayer, O Dieu, Dieu de nos peres, and the succeeding paschal cavatina. The recording sold in meagre quantities, chiefly to aficionados and rarity collectors, but its release reminded the opera world of La Juive’s existence and revivals were staged in Vienna and New York during the 1990s. The Paris Opera finally took it back in 2007.

Hitler shared a birthplace, Linz, with Anton Bruckner and considered his seventh symphony to be the summit of German music, equal to Beethoven’s Ninth. Once he won the war, he was going to rebuild Linz as the cultural capital of Europe. He blamed the Jews, wrote Joseph Goebbels, for making Brahms more popular than Bruckner.

The seventh symphony, an elegy on the death of Richard Wagner, chimed with Hitler’s mood as the war went against him. Lyrical and in the key of E major, it descends into a solemn Adagio in C-sharp minor, employing four Wagner tubas to underline the source of all sorrows. Bruckner’s was the last music played on Berlin radio before the city fell; it symbolized death, and transfiguration.

Decades later, pain-stricken and strife-torn, the most powerful conductor on record fell out with the Berlin Philharmonic and switched his next Bruckner concert to the rival Viennese. Herbert von Karajan was eighty-one years old and visibly ailing. His performance
shocked admirers for its lack of immaculate sheen, the absence of what players called his ‘ice-cold perfectionism’. There were fractured entries, a stressed roughness to the strings, a farmyard earthiness. The recording had none of his personal stamp yet Karajan, whether out of arrogance or humility, gave it his approval. Alongside epic performances by Klemperer, Furtwängler and Giulini, this stands out as an extraordinary interpretation, driven impulsively to the edge of understanding. If the opening Allegro Moderato is over-bright, the very slow Adagio veers towards the sepulchral and the Scherzo and finale are profoundly unsettling. It is impossible to know what was going through the maestro’s mind, but he seemed to be showing that imperfection was a necessary part of life, that grief and lament were not things of beauty, and that all must accept their fate. This was to be Karajan’s last record. Three months later, he was dead.

It says much for the supremacy of Maria Callas that no soprano came within one-tenth of her sales. The nearest contender was a young mezzo who, like Callas, had an unmistakable sound and an immovable will. Bartoli was spotted at nineteen at a Milan cattle-market audition by the veteran Decca producer, Christopher Raeburn. Two Rossini arias, from Tancredi and L’Italiana in Algeri, left him ‘spellbound’. Raeburn cast her in a Barber of Seville but he also booked Bartoli for a solo album of Rossini arias, a daringly premature exposure for an artist barely tested on stage. The child of two chorus singers at Rome Opera, born in 1966, Bartoli danced flamenco before she began voice training, independence and vivacity shining through as defining traits. Publicists tried to deck her in the usual paraphernalia, but Bartoli would kick offher shoes and shuck into jeans. Although she took advice from such experienced conductors as Daniel Barenboim and Nikolaus
Harnoncourt, she resisted directors with a vengeance and drove Jonathan Miller right out of the Met.

By restricting herself to five months’ work a year, she kept her voice fresh, her fees high and her privacy intact. Only Bartoli could have made best-selling albums out of obscure arias by Scarlatti, Vivaldi and Gluck. Only Bartoli could, in an age of record desperation, refuse gold-leaf blandishments and stick to the high classical repertoire that came to her so naturally. In Rossini she had no living rival, displaying a ruby-red depth of pitch and colour as the Italian Girl in Algiers, an all-conquering vitality and high vibrato as the heroine of Cenerentola. She brings a smile to the lips, even on record.

Medical science in the 1980s was helpless in the face of Aids. Thousands were swept to early, emaciated deaths and losses across the arts were severe, from Rudolf Nureyev to Rock Hudson. But in the years before the arrival of attenuating drugs, it was the non-famous victims who left the largest epitaph. A gigantic quilt was made up in Washington, D C, each square a lovingly celebrated life, and the exhibit itself a reproach to the modern world’s conscience in the face of its first real plague.