By Leon Botstein
Written for the concert Unjust Obscurity? performed on Feb 26, 1993 at Carnegie Hall.
The influence of history on today’s symphony orchestra concert repertoire is more complicated than might appear at first glance. We are, no doubt, the heirs and beneficiaries of the considered taste and judgment of generations of performers, amateurs, critics and audiences. The span of time of continuous listening and widely disseminated music criticism is about a century and a half; it began in the mid 1840s. A certain degree of stable consensus has emerged, comparable to the consensus with which we are familiar in literature and painting. No matter how historically contingent we admit our tastes in literature and painting to be (as opposed to claiming that our judgments are entirely “objective” and immune to history and culture in some formalist sense), we continue to acknowledge Dante and Shakespeare as doubtlessly great, just as we grant Leonardo and Rembrandt a permanent place in a pantheon of painters.
However, the total history of the forms of symphonic music is much shorter. There was no “classical” era, in the sense of antiquity, which the late eighteenth century could rediscover and assume as a model (as happened in art and architecture). Likewise, because of the advent during the seventeenth century of the orchestra in the modern sense, no “Renaissance” or “Middle Ages” bequeathed a body of work formally continuous in some obvious manner with the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century orchestral repertoire. We are participants in a relatively recent urban ritual, the symphonic concert.
Nevertheless, the Beethoven symphonies and the last Mozart and Haydn symphonies became the starting benchmarks of the concert hall canon (a term used here in its recent fashionable sense, not to indicate the musical form but a body of paradigmatic works) in the mid-nineteenth century. Works by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Berlioz, Schubert and Brahms were added, followed by select works by composers from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Amidst the ebb and flow of taste a small group of out-standing orchestral pieces, from Mozart to Mahler, Strauss, Sibelius and Shostakovich has emerged as the standard repertory.
However, in contrast to painting and literature, we have become enthralled by the shadow cast by the perhaps 175 orchestral pieces that make up the standard list. We compare all non-canonic works to them. We persistently invoke masterpieces to denigrate lesser-known works, even by well known composers. It is as if we have lost the joy of listening; of following in our imaginations the invention, insight and skill of most of the fine composers from the past. We seem compelled to comment, immediately after first hearing, “but it is not x” or “it is flawed, unlike y.” We have lost perspective and patience. In painting, we are sufficiently pleased and appreciative of lesser works by masters and fine works by lesser figures to hang them in museums and to spend exorbitant prices to own them. In literature, we read with delight book after book from the past without comparing what we are reading to a handful of classics.
In the concert hall, we have become intolerant of the unfamiliar. We are bored too quickly at first hearing. We have become addicted to endless repetitions of the very same works. A cult of the masterpiece has developed, and we search–often in vain–for nuances in the repeated renditions. It is as if we were film buffs who had memorized every line and frame in Casablanca, awaiting eagerly our favorite moment, only to anticipate savoring it once more. Despite the understandable pleasure we all experience in recognition through memory and repetition, the situation has become so extreme that we are in danger of losing one of the great pleasures enjoyed by audiences in the past: the act of fresh discovery and response.
This concert is dedicated to the revival of the history of music as a living presence. We are performing works that are finely crafted and inspired in their own right, written by outstanding composers who used music to express ideas with power, intensity, authenticity and artistic and emotional commitment: music by leading figures from the musical past. The works, in formal terms, are as good in every sense as most of the paintings in our museums and works of literature in print from the past, with perhaps the exception of the 175 most valued examples. That a single work is not the Beethoven Fifth, the Dvorák Cello concerto, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, Debussy’s La Mer or Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue ought not disqualify it from being listened to, even more than once.
Schmidt, Concerto for Piano Left Hand
By Leon Botstein
Written for the concert Unjust Obscurity? performed on Feb 26, 1993 at Carnegie Hall.
Franz Schmidt’s music has always been the object of fanatical advocacy by a small group of connoisseurs. His opera Notre-Dame (1904), the oratorio The Book of the Seven Seals (1937), the four symphonies and the various smaller orchestral works have always had a loyal following among highly discerning musicians. Among the most enthusiastic Schmidt adherents was Hans Keller, the eminent Austrian musician and critic who emigrated to England in the 1930s and who left an indelible and brilliant mark on twentieth-century English musical life. More than any other composer on this program, Schmidt earned within his own lifetime the reputation of an unjustly neglected master. There is little doubt that the symphonies deserve to be heard more often. They, in my opinion, are equal to the much better known works of Sibelius. In part what prevented Schmidt from receiving his deserved recognition was his personality. (A similar case was that of Hans Pfitzner.) Schmidt, a loyal child of the Habsburg Empire who lived for most of his life in Vienna, was both a fine cellist and pianist. He served for many years in the Vienna Opera orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic. In that role he developed a burning envy and hatred for Gustav Mahler and Mahler’s brother-in-law, the great violinist and concert-master Arnold Rose, whose quartet premiered much of Arnold Schoenberg’s early chamber music. Schmidt later quit the orchestra to teach piano at the Vienna Conservatory; Jealousy, bitterness and arrogance were Schmidt’s distinguishing character traits. He always felt disregarded as a composer and denigrated – unfairly – as a mere player, whose music was a pale pastiche or imitation of the styles of others. As this ambitious Concerto indicates, Schmidt’s musical architecture, thematic impulses, uses of instruments, as well as the sequencing, mode and development of musical materials owe a great deal, curiously enough, to the Viennese tradition as realized by those arch-rivals Brahms and Bruckner. This concerto was commissioned in 1934 by Schmidt’s fellow Viennese, Paul Wittgenstein, the brother of the great philosopher Ludwig and scion of one of the city’s most musical and distinguished families. Wittgenstein lost one arm in World War I. He proceeded to commission works for left hand alone from Schmidt, Strauss and Ravel. Schmidt also wrote a magnificent quintet for Wittgenstein, as well as a solo toccata.
Szymanowski, Symphony No. 1 in F minor, Op. 15 (1907)
By Leon Botstein
Written for the concert Unjust Obscurity? performed on Feb 26, 1993 at Carnegie Hall.
Before the mid-twentieth century-the era of Penderecki and Lutoslawski-the two greatest figures in the history of music in Poland were Frederic Chopin and Karol Szymanowski. Like Chopin, Szymanowski was an ardent Polish patriot. But unlike Chopin, Szymanowski lived mostly in Poland (with periods of extended stay in Vienna and Paris) and devoted much of his career, both in the early stages and at the end of his life, to furthering the cause of music in Poland. Like his more famous but comparable contemporaries, the Czech Leos Janacek and the Hungarian Bela Bartók, Szymanowski struggled to confront the powerful influences of the German and French musical traditions and, at the same time, craft a distinct style derived in part from the inspiration offered by his homeland and its linguistic and cultural traditions. However, Szymanowski (particularly after 1918) sought to develop a universal and spiritual but distinctly lyrical modernist musical language of expression. This ambition led him therefore to non-Western and oriental sources for ideas and literary texts. Szymanowski is best remembered for two stunning violin concertos, a magnificent Stabat Mater, the opera King Roger and a host of songs and chamber music.
Szymanowski wrote four works which were to be catalogued as symphonies. No. 4 was a Concertante for piano and orchestra. No. 3 was a work for chorus, soloists and orchestra. Only two works in the purely instrumental format survive. The better known of the early symphonies, No. 2 from 1909-1910 was later edited and revised with the help of the distinguished Warsaw composer/conductor Grzegorz Fitelberg, Szymanowski’s friend. The work on this concert, the First Symphony in F minor, Op. 15, although performed in 1909 in Warsaw, was never published, revived or revised. It is therefore obscure in two senses. First, like the rest of the composer’s music, it is too seldomly performed outside of Poland. Second, within Szymanowski’s oeuvre, this work has been given short shrift as a bit “crude”, and not representative of the gifts and achievements characteristic of the mature Szymanowski.
This performance can therefore test the conventional view of this composer’s early work. Only two movements exist. Taken together, they make a powerful musical essay. True, the influence of Richard Strauss and the traditions of Liszt and Wagner are clearly evident. But, as in the case of early Brahms (where the influence of Schumann can be detected easily), there is a compelling immediacy of invention and a wholly original instinct for drama and orchestration less prevalent in Szymanowski’s later works. In this work for example, Szymanowski innovates in the formal structure–in the way the seams within the movements are sewn together by harmonic change and orchestration. He chooses — courageously — to end the work by avoiding the cadential cliches of his time, leaving the listener with a startling mix of finality and ambiguity. Although the composer referred to his first symphony in later years as a “monstrum contrapuntal-harmonic-orchestral,” the brash youthful energy that comes through is convincing. Perhaps the work has suffered because of the title. If it were regarded less as a symphonic fragment, and more as a two-part symphonic tone poem, the work might have taken its rightful place alongside the great Strauss tone poems from the same period. This work can be compared to Bartók’s Kossuth from 1903, a fine youthful symphonic essay by another great twentieth century composer written under the spell of Strauss’ example.