Barenboim’s Three-ring Circus
If you follow me on Twitter, it should be obvious that I didn’t enjoy the last of Daniel Barenboim’s Beethoven Piano Concerto cycle at the Festival Hall.
My main purpose in going was to hear Schoenberg’s brilliant Variations for Orchestra, op. 31 rather than the piano concerto, which I expected to be lush, mannered and performed as though 30 years of work from musicians like John Eliot Gardiner, Christopher Hogwood and co counted for nothing. Those fears were realised in the rendition of Beethoven’s third piano concerto, which reminded me powerfully, especially in the first movement cadenza, of Grieg.
The programme announced an “illustrated talk” on the Schoenberg following the break, by which they meant a talk with excerpts from the piece, rather than some kind of even more ghastly PowerPoint presentation.
Barenboim is extremely fond of his own voice, and he’s perhaps the most verbally incontinent maestro since Bernstein, as his Reith Lectures a few years ago and his appearance at the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert demonstrate. Here, he patronised an audience he blatantly accused of not knowing the piece by repeating the theme at least 20 times and then showing how it was transformed throughout the piece.
This is potentially an interesting technique, but was ruined by his insistence on treating us like a bunch of musically ignorant fools, which may be true of part of the audience but is certainly not so for all of it. The result for anyone who knows the piece was that it was ruined by an over-emphasis on the theme and by Barenboim’s characterisation of the other material as “irrelevant”.
The performance of the Variations was OK, and lacked the mannerism and inaccuracies of the Beethoven. But then, something almost unbelievably crass happened.
Normally an educated audience will pause before applauding until the conductor has signalled by relaxing his arms that the piece has concluded, not because he doesn’t think the audience knows the piece has finished, but in order to focus the audience’s minds on the music they have just heard. Abbado does this with Mahler, to the extent that he sometimes waits for a minute or more at the end of a symphony – especially the 9th – before allowing the audience to applaud. The effect of this is extraordinary; there is a very special sound made by 2,000 people trying to remain entirely silent.
Barenboim, on the other hand, waited perhaps a second before announcing “that’s it” over his shoulder. The audience, fully in thrall to his cult of personality, stood to applaud, despite the fact that for a majority of them it was the first time they’d ever heard the piece.
Incredibly, it got worse.
Schoenberg’s atonal music is very cerebral even though at its heart is a searing passion. It has a very specific aesthetic that is almost monk-like. It is pure intellectual music. It has no “story” (what musical academics would call a “programme”). It’s like a Samuel Beckett play, or an abstract expressionist painting. It’s at the junction between intellect and aesthetics. This is why I love it.
Barenboim returned to the podium and indicated that he was going to play an encore and, true to form, decided to introduce it with some pseudo intellectualising. He quoted Milan Kundera in Ignorance making fun of Schoenberg for expecting that people would whistle his music in the streets instead of Strauss waltzes. Kundera’s point is that intellectual art remains intellectual art and rarely if ever transitions to popularity. For an example, think of how many people can sing the start of Beethoven’s 5th symphony compared to the number of can sing the start of (or have even heard) the Grosse Fuge or the Missa Solemnis.
Barenboim’s reading of Kundera was so wrong-headed that he then announced that he was going to play “a Strauss Waltz” (in fact he didn’t play a “waltz” but Unter Donner und Blitz, which is a polka). It’s the most crass thing I’ve ever experienced in a concert hall. It’s like pouring hot chocolate sauce over beautifully prepared sashimi.
In another of his great books – perhaps his greatest – The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera rails against kitsch which he memorably defines as “the absolute denial of shit”. Strauss’s world is in utter denial of shit, set as it is atop the lofty, saccharine heights of kitsch. There is no music more opposite to Schoenberg’s works than Strauss. Barenboim’s reading of Kundera is so perverse that the only possible explanation I can think of is that he was deliberately insulting the audience, as if he were saying “look at this shit that you prefer”.
But I’m certain that’s not what he was doing; the public’s affection and adulation is too important to him, which can be clearly seen when he takes the podium for a solo bow, or stands out in front of the orchestra, blatantly courting a standing ovation. Contrast this with Abbado’s self-effacing behaviour on the podium, or with Salonen, or Boulez, or Mackerras, or any number of more modest maestros. Also, consider his bizarre programme at the Proms a couple of years ago where he paired Bartók and Ligeti with, wait for it, Kodály and Enescu (the only link being the composers’ Hungarian nationality), with an encore by Strauss again (which went catastrophically wrong and nearly broke down, if I remember correctly).
Barenboim is not a servant of the music, and is not an intellectual, despite his pretensions. He is a shameless showman who deserves to be treated as such. I don’t think I ever want to hear him make music ever again.
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14 Responses to “Barenboim’s Three-ring Circus”
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Allow me to make two short comments:
1) “It is pure intellectual music” [...] “It’s at the junction between intellect and aesthetics”… have you really listened to this music? I mean, listened beyond your simplistic classifications? You go some way in saying that “… even though at its heart is a searing passion”, but it doesn’t seem like you grasp that this is more than anything physical music, soundwaves and colours hitting your stomach.
2) “There is no music more opposite to Schoenberg’s works than Strauss.” Yet Schoenberg transcribed some of Strauss’ (Johann the II) works for chamber ensemble, so he cannot have thought Strauss’ music to be completely kitschy. Again, simplistic classifications is going to take you nowhere but to (a hightened, intellectual form of) ignorance.
Oh, and btw: your inability to see the connection between Bartók and Ligeti on the one hand and Kodály and Enescu on the other (beside their nationality) really speaks volumes
Thanks for your comment James. We clearly had a markedly different response to the concert, though I feel that this is guided by our own opposed views of Barenboim himself. I, for one, went in to the RFH with admiration from the off, so perhaps that blinkered my views. Yes, I suppose the “that’s it” was on the cheap side and the Strauss encore ostensibly counterintuitive, but to say that his Beethoven performance was ignorant of 30 years of musical performance history is reductive in the extreme. He’s just not that musician and thank goodness that the Beethoven of Haitink and Barenboim can exist in the same world as that of Gardiner or Norrington. I couldn’t cope without either.
In general, however, you don’t focus on the performance, but on the manner in which the performance was presented.
“There is no music more opposite to Schoenberg’s works than Strauss. Barenboim’s reading of Kundera is so perverse that the only possible explanation I can think of is that he was deliberately insulting the audience, as if he were saying “look at this shit that you prefer”.”
Schoenberg himself would have begged to differ on the first point, having arranged some of the Waltz King’s work himself and, coming from the band in the Prater, his early musical life was dominated by that sound world. I don’t feel that Barenboim was insulting us in any way… merely highlighting the virtuosity of the Staatskapelle Berlin and the polarities of music during that explosion of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Having referenced the waltz and its world during his talk, surely he was returning us to point from which Schoenberg’s variations had embarked. Though, again, you are right in quoting Barenboim’s erroneous use of the word waltz, when clearly it was a polka. The Kaiserwaltz would have illustrated the point much better.
A man who can construct Beethoven in so bold a fashion (regardless of the slips), bring the luxuriant post-Wagnerian colour of Schoenberg’s early work to such torrid outbursts, clarify the atonal and serial works so beautifully and be the holder of both a Palestinian and Israeli passport is good in my book. If that’s showmanship, I want to savour it every night of the week.
1/ Yes I’ve “really listened” to this music; I’ve been doing so all my life. At one level I believe that music is indeed nothing more than soundwaves and “colours hitting my stomach”. The mystery of how it comes to be more than that is one of the many things I love about music. Are these really “simplistic classifications”? I don’t think so. Schoenberg’s music is complex (and varied – sometimes even within the same work, for example Gurrelieder) and it is possibly dangerous to generalise about it, but I’d be interested to know what you think I’ve missed about Schoenberg’s music that isn’t raw passion or intellectual froideur. He reminds me of Thomas Mann, who was also in the permanent grip of a fight between Apollo and Dionysius.
2/ Nothing about Schoenberg orchestrating Strauss says that he didn’t consider it kitschy (he may have done it as a joke, I don’t know). Nothing about what Schoenberg thought about Strauss alters Strauss’s fundamental kitschyness, unless we want to remove the meaning from the word kitsch.
@anonymous – your coy comment doesn’t help me in my appalling ignorance of what could link these almost entirely different compositions (aside from nationality as I pointed out). Instead of snide remarks like that, why not enumerate the things that they share?
“He reminds me of Thomas Mann, who was also in the permanent grip of a fight between Apollo and Dionysius.” Doesn’t all drama? Doesn’t all art? Polarities, dichotomies, whatever you want to call them are in fact the motors of art, hence Nietzsche’s polemic.
Schoenberg once said to Berg “Strauss, now there is a great master.” It wasn’t a joke. Hence his instruction to both Berg and Webern that they write arrangements of the waltzes for the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen. And there is decidedly more kunst than kitsch in a number of the waltzes.
@gavin “He’s just not that musician” – that’s true, and I know it, hence my expectation. But I do fundamentally object to performing Beethoven in this way today. Maybe that’s reductive, even in the extreme. I don’t know.
Furtwängler’s approach was fine in its way because of its time (although I still find it basically impossible to listen to), but he exerts such a malign influence over Barenboim that I find it perverse. I cannot help thinking of the historically informed performance movement as being one of clarity and respect for the score which I simply don’t find in Barenboim’s music making.
I still can’t see how Schoenberg making orchestrations of Strauss is any indication that they wrote even remotely similar music. I’m unable to detect even the slightest resemblance between that polka and the Variations. The result is, whichever way I look at it, perverse.
But aren’t some of the juxtapositions in Schoenberg’s “late” style in their own way perverse? Each variation is markedly different. The word kaleidoscopic is used so often in relation to the work of Schoenberg and his peers precisely because it is destablising, using opposite ends of the kunst/kitsch spectrum… I can hear many links between the work of Johann Strauss, Mahler, Berg and Schoenberg.
On your other soap box, however. I agree that the period performance revolution has reinvigorated our approach to established scores. Likewise, it has sometimes railroaded us all into thinking that everything goes ludicrously fast or must be played with reduced forces. Barenboim’s quip of “how do you know what it sounded like? were you there?” may be silly, but it unmasks the great hitch at the heart of the debate. Taste is one thing, dismissing other people’s is quite another.
@gavin surely, surely Schoenberg’s work, as Mann’s, is most obviously in this fight between poles? Could we say that, say, Rachmaninov, contains any measure of Apollo at all? I can’t hear it.
I’m sure that Schoenberg’s remark to his pupils was ironic at the very least. Or maybe I’m back to square one in trying to understand music at all. I’ve spent my life listening to, studying and performing music, and I find Strauss and Schoenberg as dissimilar as can possibly be.
I think you underestimate Rachmaninov and contrarily place Schoenberg on a pedestal. He was rarely dismissive of other people’s work and, famously, adored Gershwin. Why spend hours ‘ironically’ writing a brilliant condensation of Strauss’s masterful Kaiserwaltz otherwise? We all need to revise our opinions once in a while.
@gavin yes, the juxtapositions can be perverse (not just in the late style; think of Gurrelieder!) but they are Schoenberg’s juxtapositions – it’s his work, and he can do all the juxtaposing, perverse or otherwise, that he likes. Barenboim’s juxtaposition of Strauss and Schoenberg is offensive and gratuitous in my opinion.
Barenboim’s objections to period performance are no more credible than were Karajan’s. Of course this is only my own taste, and I don’t think I ever claimed it was anything else.
@gavin yes, we need to revise, that’s certainly true, and I’ve found this debate fascinating. I shall certainly read more about Schoenberg’s admiration for music that I consider to be full of kitsch, but I can’t ever see myself being able to listen to Rachmaninov without wanting to shave my tongue afterwards!
On the Bartók/Ligeti/Kodály/Enescu: I’m sorry if my remark came out as unkind. I was maybe just a little annoyed by your very trenchant way of dismissing something as bizarre on no foundation at all.
Well, one obvious starting point would be to focus on their deep immersion in the world of folk song. Kodály and Bartók toured the country together, mapping out and documenting, and later incorporating it into their music in very different ways, with this fascinating blend of the source music, their take on it, and then something completely different. Enescu also incorporated folk music inspiration into his compositions, but again the way he does it is not quite like Bartók and Kodály. I for one find that fascinating.
But apart from what they share, it is also interesting to hear what more-or-less contemporaries have to say, how they respond to their own time and what has come before. And that goes equally for juxtaposing the world of the Viennese waltz/polka and what was to come shortly thereafter. I think Schoenberg et al.’s relationship to the “old” Vienna is more complex than categorising them into respectively kitsch and “real” art.
I won’t bombard you with quotations, just this one from Berg on his (and Schoenberg and Weberns) arrangement of Strauss-waltzes: “In this manner it is possible to hear and judge modern orchestral scores stripped of all sound effects that an orchestra produces and all of its sensory aids. Thereby invalidating the common criticism that this music owes its effects solely to its more or less rich and striking instrumentation and does not possess all of the features which were formerly characteristic of good music: melodies, richness of harmony, polyphony, perfect form, architecture, etc.”
Polyphony, perfect form, architecture… doesn’t exactly fit with your view that they found this music kitsch. And before you object: yes, he says “formerly”, so I’m not saying they don’t have another way of thinking what constitutes “good music” in their time. But I am saying that you miss something of the picture when deliberately trying to neglect the baggage of these composers. And that is what I meant by “simplistic categorisations”.
Daniel Barenboim is considered one of the most prominent musicians of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as both pianist and conductor. He is noted for his mastery of conveying musical structure, and for a deep sensitivity to harmonic nuances.