Over the last ten years
there have been several intelligent
books on past conductors from American
University publishers, including biographical
studies of Fritz Reiner and Bruno Walter.
With that in mind I looked forward to
reading this book on the ‘virtuoso’
conductor.
The term ‘virtuoso’,
in the etymological sense, has a long,
and rather confusing history; for Aristotle
it simply meant a kind of practical
wisdom, or good will; for Machiavelli
it meant a more tactical deployment
of ethical know-how. But from the early
19th Century, in musical
terms, with figures like Liszt and Paganini,
‘virtuoso’ became more a connotation
for displays of compositional, and more
specifically, performance brilliance,
which however did not necessarily militate
against musical integrity and sincerity.
Holden does not categorically
define what he means by ‘virtuoso’,
but he does, in the preface, stake-out
his criteria and parameters for the
‘virtuoso conductors’ he discusses.
This is in terms of belonging to a particularly
European heritage, and tradition, having
continuing artistic, cultural connections
to that tradition, which Holden sees
in general terms as emanating from the
example of Richard Wagner.
From this preface I
noticed a slippage between what Holden
defines as ‘European’, and ‘Central
European’. From ‘Central European’,
in the geographical, and Habsburg sense,
I would have read as encompassing Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, Romania, Poland among other
territories. And from the more general
term European I would, in the geographical,
cultural and musical sense, have included
France, and at least the Netherlands!
But then, Holden tells us, his preferred
‘virtuoso conductors’ must have spent
the ‘greater part’ of their career in
‘German-speaking’ countries, which here
are basically confined to Germany and
Austria, particularly the cultural centres
such as; Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig and
Munich.
Indeed all of Holden’s
ten chosen examples came either from
Austria or Germany, with the exception
of Arthur Nikisch who, although born
in Hungary, from an early period in
his career operated in German and Austrian
centres, and spoke predominantly German.
So, from Holden’s perspective, important
virtuoso conductors like: Habeneck,
Berlioz, Lamoureux, Pasdeloup, Monteux,
Désormière, in France
alone, are either not mentioned, or
relegated to marginal status. Willem
Mengelberg (seen by Richard Strauss,
and Mahler as the quintessential virtuoso
conductor) is mentioned in peripheral,
footnote terms a couple of times! And
is not Italy part of Europe? Arturo
Toscanini, who literally defined virtuoso
conducting, orchestral performance and
opera production in the late 19th
and early 20th Centuries,
is relegated to about a half a dozen
citations, mostly marginally or in contradistinction
(negatively) to conductors like Furtwängler.
Important Czechs like Sejna, Talich
and Ancerl are not mentioned. Also not
mentioned, or marginalised, are Hungarians
like Fritz Reiner - seen by many as
the ultimate virtuoso conductor whose
only equal was Toscanini - George Szell,
Antal Dorati, Ferenc Fricsay, among
others.
But even in Holden’s
rather limited Germano-centric parameters
I simply can’t understand why conductors
like Erich Kleiber, or Fritz Busch are
excluded, or placed at the periphery.
By 1923 Kleiber was general music director
at the Berlin State Opera - a more prestigious
post than either those of Walter (Charlottenberg)
and Klemperer (Kroll). There he gave
such important premieres as ‘Jenufa’
and ‘Wozzeck’. Kleiber also conducted
regularly the Berlin Philharmonic and,
as a native Viennese, the Vienna Philharmonic,
up until the time of his death in 1956.
Here, it could be argued Kleiber fulfils
all of Holden’s rather arbitrary criteria,
a conductor who ‘wielded considerable
artistic power’, not just a ‘jobbing
conductor’, more completely than say
Furtwängler who, as Holden concedes,
was not a particularly ‘natural’ opera
conductor, in the same sense that Kleiber
was. One only has to compare Furtwängler’s
characterful but unrefined heavy conducting
in ‘Figaro’, with Kleiber’s wonderfully
agile, elegant conducting of the work
in his famous Vienna (1954) recording.
Kleiber, although not Jewish, left Germany
for South and North America in 1935
in protest at the Nazi regime, only
to return to Europe after Hitler’s defeat.
Similarly Fritz Busch regularly conducted
the main German orchestras and was music
director for over ten years at the Dresden
Opera (giving important premieres of
operas by Richard Strauss, Busoni, and
Hindemith) before also leaving Germany
in disgust at the crude racial violence
of the Nazi regime. But the main point
is that both these conductors would
qualify equally, if not more, than some
of Holden’s chosen examples, as prime
virtuoso conductors, and in the wider
meaning of that term. It also seems
strange that Holden, who places particular
importance on the range of modern, or
contemporary music performed by the
conductors he discusses, does not so
much as mention Hans Rosbaud. More than
all the conductors considered Rosbaud
consistently championed the modern,
the avant-garde. Rosbaud, up to his
death in 1962, was programming the music
of young composers like Stockhausen,
Boulez, Xenakis, Zimmermann, Nono, Ligeti,
Petrassi, Berio and many others. And
Rosbaud was no ‘jobbing conductor’ holding
important positions at Munich, Frankfurt,
Mainz, Donaueschingen, Aix-en-Provence
and Baden-Baden. I am not sure what
Holden means by ‘wielding considerable
artistic power’? If artistic power can
be measured in terms of lasting influence
through almost unprecedented development
of conductorial skills in the performance
of new music and it’s technical challenges
then Rosbaud certainly surpasses most
of Holden’s elite maestros.
Holden uses Wagner’s
example (‘a giant figure’) as the model
for the development of the conducting
tradition exemplified by his chosen
‘virtuoso’ conductors. Although Wagner’s
enormous influence on conducting is
undeniable its direct influence is more
discernable in three of Holden’s nine
examples: Von Bülow, Nikisch, and
Furtwängler. And even here, with
Nikisch there is a rhythmic flamboyance,
noted by many, in his conducting, which
is not particularly Wagnerian. Other
conductors Holden discusses, like Weingartner,
Richard Strauss, Klemperer and Karajan,
all, in their different ways, considerably
departed from the Wagner paradigm of
‘melos’ rhetorical gesture and flexible
tempi. Weingartner’s famous Beethoven
interpretations, in their classical
objectivity and lack of subjective ‘interpretation’,
were seen in their day as more akin
to Toscanini’s approach.
The chapters on Von
Bülow, Mahler, Richard Strauss,
Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Wilhelm
Furtwängler and Herbert Von Karajan
are all adequate in terms of factual
exposition, but I didn’t have the sense
of Holden shedding any particularly
new light on any of these figures. All
have been comprehensively discussed
and analysed far more thoroughly elsewhere
particularly, in the case of Mahler,
the massive study by La Grange. Also
there does not seem to be a consensus,
from those who were present at Mahler
performances, on the nature of his conducting/interpretation;
this is not discussed by Holden. The
chapters on Nikisch and Weingartner
come over as more interesting, partly
due to the relative lack of information,
at least compared with the above-mentioned
examples, on these two important figures.
We learn that Nikisch, at the Gewandhaus
in Leipzig, championed new music by
Mahler, Reger, Pfitzner, Busoni, Korngold
and Schoenberg. Similarly the chapter
on Weingartner emphasises his wide range
of sympathies in opera; ‘Les Huguenots’
and ‘La Juive’, Berlioz ‘L’Enfance du
Christ’, ‘La Damnation de Faust’, ‘Roméo
et Juliette’, and new music by the likes
of Stravinsky, Debussy, Korngold and
Schreker.
The chapter on Klemperer
is entitled; ‘A Troubled Mind: Otto
Klemperer’. But apart from simply regurgitating
the rather out-dated (in psychological,
psychoanalytic terms) ‘manic’ and ‘depressive
phases’ of Klemperer’s mental disposition
Holden does not reveal much more than
is already known, from Peter Heyworth
and Klemperer’s daughter Lotte, about
Klemperer’s ‘troubled mind’. As in other
parts of the book there are many minor
inaccuracies, mostly concerning dates
and repertoire detail. Holden states
that ‘between 1959 and 1964’ Klemperer,
at the Royal Festival Hall with the
Philharmonia, only performed Bruckner’s
last three symphonies. I am not sure
why Holden can only take us up to 1964
here (Klemperer conducted there until
1971). Klemperer certainly conducted
the 4th symphony of Bruckner
there in the late ’fifties.
The fact that Klemperer
visited and conducted in Leningrad and
Moscow in the ’twenties, and was at
one point contemplating staying in Russia
is not mentioned. This is a puzzling
omission as Klemperer met Shostakovich
in Moscow and was contemplating performing
the premiere of that composer’s massive
fourth symphony. The fact that he eventually
did not perform the work hardly detracts
from the importance of the meeting.
Holden, throughout the book, makes hardly
any reference to the political context
of the periods discussed and the way
that it affected the lives and careers
of the conductors who were active in
the Nazi period. Holden observes that
Klemperer, in his comment on Richard
Strauss’s ‘Metamorphosen’ as ‘basically
quite nice’ was being ‘curiously facile’
about a work of ‘deep emotional intensity’.
Here Holden seems curiously blind to
the way Klemperer, a Jewish musician,
viewed Strauss, particularly the latter’s
controversial relationship with the
Nazi regime and his collaboration with
many of their brutal policies; all meticulously
documented in books like Matthew Boyden’s
‘Richard Strauss’ 1999. I am not sure
what ‘deep emotional intensity’ means,
but surely Klemperer’s coolness in relation
to this work and its composer is due
in some part to Strauss’s silence on
the regime’s crimes towards European
Jewry and others and its ‘In memoriam’
heading which for Strauss meant the
allied destruction of his beloved German
Opera houses etc. A case of monumental
insensitivity from the composer of Der
Rosenkavalier.
The chapter on Furtwängler
is entitled: ‘Transcendental Furtwängler’.
But Holden singularly fails to elucidate
the nature of Furtwängler’s ‘transcendental’
qualities, apart from a remark that
he brought ‘fresh insights to every
performance’, which could well apply
to all the conductors he discusses.
But transcendental in what sense? Transcendental
of his historical context? Or in the
Kantian analytic sense of the ‘unity
of apperception’? Why does Holden incorporate
the notion of the transcendental and
not explain it, follow it through?
It is amazing how Holden
can elide the, for me, crucial questions
of political, particularly Nazi influence,
in connection with the conductors he
considers. I have already made reference
to the Nazi involvement of Richard Strauss:
Holden seems to think that a letter
Strauss sent to Stefan Zweig in 1935,
where he distances himself from the
Party, is enough to sort the issue out!
Similarly with Furtwängler Holden
seems to think his obvious compromising
of his position by conducting at Hitler’s
birthday can be explained away by his
‘resistance’ to the regime. The details
of Furtwängler’s resistance here
are not included.. In a book that discusses
both the careers of Bruno Walter and
Furtwängler I would have expected
excerpts from Walter’s 1949 correspondence
with Furtwängler where he strongly
criticises the latter for a total compromising
of his art and humanity in the service
of the ‘Regime of the Devil’.
Holden concludes with
a consideration of Herbert Von Karajan.
Again I could discern absolutely nothing
new here. And again the complex issue
of Karajan’s Nazi links are here simply
skipped-over as another biographical
sequence. For Holden Karajan’s own self-justification
that he joined the Nazi party as a career
move seems to be enough. Although the
full details of Karajan’s involvement
are still not known, the 1990 study
of the conductor by Robert C Bachmann
deals with issue far more critically,
demonstrating Karajan’s complicity in
the selectivity of crucial documentary
material.
Despite some excellent
biographical studies of important conductors
recently, we still need a comprehensive
study of the profession, its history,
genres, styles, recordings, the de-mystification
of some of the myths, the influences,
or not, of older traditions on contemporary
conductor trends and the future of the
profession. Although Holden’s book attempts
to evaluate issues and answer some of
these questions it does so in a way
which is too restricted, too selective,
too standardised to meet the complex,
critical themes and questions the subject
demands.
Geoff Diggines
