Suppose a conductor took out his copy of the famous
Furtwängler disc of Schumann 4 and, listening to it through headphones,
conducted the performance he was hearing, with a live orchestra in front
of him; would that orchestra follow his lead and clone the Furtwängler
performance? Well, actually not, for a start because the players would
laugh such a "conductor" off the podium. Cloning a famous
performance is not quite that simple, yet the fact remains that one
has been practically cloned here. The signs are there from the
start. The first statement of the opening motto theme, followed by a
crescendo leading to an offbeat crash from the full orchestra, finds
Thielemann preceding that crash with an extraordinarily prolonged upbeat
such as only the Master himself dared – and as near as makes no difference
the same prolongation, though he is not quite so convincing in
timing how to move on. Thereafter the introduction rolls forward in
waves, just as the Master’s did, and breaks out into an identically
deliberate, but energetic, Lebhaft which is characterised by
those same well-remembered slackenings and surges. It is, in a certain
sense, very finely brought off, with a wholehearted orchestral response,
alert to every shift in tempo. The only thing is that the ebbings of
tempo, and in particular those glimpses of D major serenity, sometimes
bring a lowering of tension which was not the case with the great original.
Thielemann is masterly in showing that it is possible to reproduce what
Furtwängler did, but reproducing why he did it is
not so easy.
And why reproduce so exactly one of Furtwängler’s
oddest traits? Frankly, I had always supposed that the long, long pause
between the first movement’s unfinished cadence and the A minor chord
which heralds the second movement was down to the engineers, unaware
that the two movements are not separated by a pause, rather than something
that Furtwängler did himself (I have the Furtwängler on an
old Heliodor LP, I don’t know if this gap has remained the same on recent
transfers), but here it is reproduced to the second. And so it goes
on. The broken phrasing of the Romanze, the sunset dying away
from the sternly energetic Scherzo, the full Wagnerian works in the
famous build up to the Finale and all the ebbs and flows with which
this last movement’s progress is mapped out are exactly as one remembered
them from the model.
I do appreciate the problem. Ever since I heard Furtwängler’s
absolutely riveting account it has burnt itself into my mind and for
me, in a way, Schumann’s 4th Symphony is that. While
this fact has not wholly prevented me from appreciating other interpretations,
they always sound to me like variants (even if my intellect tells me
that they, and not Furtwängler, are closer to what Schumann actually
wrote). As I am not a conductor I haven’t had to face the problem of
how to resolve my internal conflict between Schumann/Furtwängler
(which is a part of my being) and Schumann himself (i.e. the score as
my only guide). I can only suppose that Thielemann, faced with a similar
conflict, decided emotively in favour of the first solution. I must
seem a thoroughly ungrateful fellow, feeling myself an "orphan
of Furtwängler" when I hear it done differently, and now criticising
a performance that sounds the same; heard live, maybe I’d just be grateful
for hearing in a concert something that approximated so closely to an
interpretation which has been silent for half a century. The problem
is that on disc I have the original available, old-sounding compared
to this but pretty good for its age. And the fact is that Thielemann
in the last resort does not quite provide the same overwhelming experience.
It’s not that he has not made all the vagaries thoroughly his own, but
he cannot avoid the impression that he is traversing charted territory
while Furtwängler was launched into unknown regions of his soul
(to paraphrase Whitman). And, though the discographic world is not flooded
with alternative Furtwängler Schumann Fourths as it is with Eroicas,
surely his other performances were different?
In the case of the first symphony there is also a Furtwängler
precedent, a live performance from Munich which has not been so widely
reissued and which I have not heard. Maybe this is all for the better;
in this case I can take what Thielemann has to offer on its own terms.
And during the first two movements I was pretty impressed. Tempi are
deliberate but he knows, for example, how to make a sequence grow
so that it does not seem merely repetitive. My problems began with
the scherzo which really does seem a long way below Schumann’s "Molto
vivace" and, however carefully phrased, rather lugubrious. And
even more with the Finale. It may be fair enough to sidle into the main
theme (after the opening flourish) below tempo once or even twice
(picking up the tempo as you go along), but it seems a bit much to do
it every time. This is symptomatic of the fact this Finale doesn’t
quite go, and as Finales are expected to go then some
people are going to think that Schumann himself had written a Finale
which speaks amiably of woodland tales but hardly makes for a symphonic
conclusion. The essential Schumannesque exultation is missing. I know
that the symphonies come from an older Schumann than the one who wrote
all those infatuated-sounding piano works for Clara, overflowing into
the annus mirabilis of song when he married her, but to suggest
that his Eusebius was by now content to croon by the fireside while
an avuncular Florestan looks on seems reductive, and inconsistent with
the psychology of the composer who later threw himself into the Rhine.
I checked out a performance Celibidache conducted in Milan in 1968 and,
while he found plenty of time for detail, he also caught that overall
surge. I do feel, though, that Thielemann would be well-suited to the
homely pleasures of Raff and that DG should engage him to record a cycle
of that composer’s symphonies.
The famous Schumann cycles (Sawallisch, Karajan, Szell,
Kubelik, and Boult if you can find it) are all in their various ways
classical interpretations. If you prefer a romantic alternative then
give these daringly well-meanings a try, especially if you have difficulties
with the historic sound of the Furtwängler versions.
Christopher Howell
Philharmonia Orchestra/Christian
Thielemann