Arts Archives are clearly
dedicated to preserving the art of Peter
Maag, an under-recorded conductor after
his brilliant start on Decca. Having
succeeded in making a number of recordings
of him in his last years, notably a
Beethoven cycle but also Mozart, Mendelssohn
and Gluck, they are now making a selective
trawl of the RAI archives, which contain
a vast array of his performances over
a period of some thirty years. Since
various off-the-air bootleg issues have
given the idea that the RAI is a pretty
dicey source of historical material,
I should emphasise that these are official
releases bearing the RAI-Trade emblem.
They use the original master tapes which
are revealed, apart from a miscalculation
in the Rhapsody which I shall come to
later, to be extremely fine with excellent
stereo definition and a rich, warm sound.
Furthermore, if the name of the RAI
orchestras spells horror in some quarters,
in the seventies the Turin orchestra
in particular was at some sort of peak.
This was evident from the recent Mendelssohn
issue and the Cluytens recordings of
Honegger and Debussy on this same label;
altogether richer in timbre than the
band which Maag’s master Furtwängler
had conducted from this same rostrum
more than twenty years earlier, a recording
some readers may know. They are not
immaculate, but immaculacy was not one
of Maag’s primary concerns (or Brahms’s?)
and they respond warmly to the phrasing
and shading he calls for. No doubt the
BPO or the VPO would have been better
still, but we need not feel that Maag’s
interpretation is reaching us in an
imperfect form.
The notes suggest that
Maag’s neglect was caused by his sudden
flight to a Tibetan monastery for nearly
two years and the consequent cancellation
of a many important engagements. Maag
himself confirmed this view in an interview
- which can be found on the Internet.
I beg to suggest, however, that there
were other reasons too. As time went
on Maag’s interpretations had become
increasingly unpredictable and personalized.
I remember attending a performance of
Mendelssohn’s "Scottish" Symphony
in Milan in about 1978 or 1979 where
the music came to a complete standstill
on several occasions, very different
from his famous Decca recording of the
same work. At the time I found it perplexing
though I admired the wholehearted response
he got from the orchestra.
And so it is with the
First Symphony here. The first movement
begins with a well characterized introduction
and the Allegro itself gets under way
with much tragic impetus. Then the tempo
slackens ... and slackens ... and slackens
until it practically comes to a standstill,
then picks up, of course, then during
the development comes to another halt,
and so on. Similar things happen in
the finale, and at certain moments in
the Andante sostenuto, already expounded
at a luxuriantly expansive pace, the
music drifts into almost motionless
contemplation. Maag goes further in
this direction, in fact, than his master
Furtwängler who in Turin made creative
use of the orchestra’s thin sonority
to produce a lean, classical reading
which might surprise his admirers as
well as his detractors. I would say
that only Celibidache, in the post-Furtwängler
era, approached Brahms with comparable
romantic license.
For the truth is that,
for much of Maag’s career, he was increasingly
adopting an interpretative stance that
was out of fashion. Furtwängler
is venerated today but in the fifties
and sixties it was still Toscanini who
held sway. Most of Furtwängler’s
records were out of the catalogue (only
his Tristan kept a permanent place)
and were often rudely dismissed by critics
when an attempt was made to revive them.
The craze for searching out Furtwängler’s
live performances began in the seventies
and reached its peak in the eighties,
when saturation - virtually everything
that survived had been issued - led
to a reassessment of other romantically-inclined
conductors. The Berlin Philharmonic’s
decision to appoint Karajan rather than
Celibidache as Furtwängler’s successor
was practically an official burial of
the romantic approach to music-making.
So Maag’s big crime
was that he was a romantic interpreter
in a world that didn’t want romantic
interpretations. His special brand of
romanticism seems to have stemmed from
his love of opera. Though undoubtedly
dedicated to the symphonic repertoire
I have the idea that his greatest love
was opera, but even here he was a throwback
to the age of the conductor and this
was the age of the producer. In what
should have been a glorious milestone
in his career, his Paris "Ring",
he fell foul of a producer (I forget
who it was) who demanded faster tempi
and, when he didn’t get them, imposed
maximum timings as an ultimatum, forcing
Maag’s withdrawal. As the press pointed
out, Maag’s timings were not particularly
long and shorter than Furtwängler’s.
However, in later life Maag organized
an annual opera class in Treviso, near
Venice, where singers chosen through
an audition-competition were patiently
prepared for a production of an opera.
Quite a number of subsequently famous
singers went through this class.
The relevance of this
is that Maag’s approach to musical architecture
was more an operatic one, where each
episode is given maximum characterization
and structure is created by the placing
of climaxes rather than by aligning
everything to a uniform rhythmic trajectory.
This differentiates him from the superficially
similar Celibidache who appears to have
had no interest in opera. And it differentiates
him from practically every other conductor
contemporary with him. Toscanini had
decreed that things should be done otherwise
and oddly enough even a conductor like
Bruno Walter, who could be thoroughly
romantic in other contexts, took a fairly
classical view of Brahms.
Does this mean that
Maag was wrong? Not necessarily. The
conductors whose roots go back to Brahms’s
own world and who left us recordings
are fairly evenly divided between romantics
(Mengelberg) and classics (Weingartner).
Maag certainly reveals a side of Brahms
often passed over, bringing him closer
to the Lisztian-Wagnerian camp than
to his usual severe self. At the very
least his view deserves a hearing.
In Milan three years
later the engineers unfortunately had
the singer’s mikes turned up too high
for her first entry, where she dwarfs
the orchestra. I get the impression
they very gently lower them, a bit at
a time, so as not to create a jolt,
with the result that the singer wanders
from left to right of the soundstage
until the balance settles into the right
one and the recording then becomes a
fine one. Fortunately Lucia Valentini-Terrani’s
voice is a magnificent instrument which
can withstand such close scrutiny, rich,
even and luscious in a very Italianate
way, but always in sympathy with the
music. She loved the piece very much
and made no studio recording of it.
Maag’s conducting is again heartfelt,
softer-edged than Klemperer’s would-be
Mahlerian rendering with Ludwig and
sufficiently forward-moving to avoid
the longueurs of the funereal Ferrier/Krauss
reading. With the proviso over the recording,
this seems to me as rewarding a performance
as any in the catalogue.
Might Maag yet become
a cult figure? If he doesn’t it won’t
be for lack of trying on the part of
Arts Archives and I for one will certainly
be interested to see what they come
up with next.
Christopher Howell
Lucia Valentini-Terrani (contralto)* 
