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Timekeepers. Simon Garfield
Читать онлайн.Название Timekeepers
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isbn 9781782113201
Автор произведения Simon Garfield
Издательство Ingram
The evening began well. Before the premiere there were two other recent compositions: the overture Die Weihe des Hauses, which had been commissioned for the opening of another Viennese concert hall two years earlier, and three movements from his great D Major Mass Missa Solemnis. As his new symphony began, Beethoven was a dramatic figure on stage, his hair and arms wild and everywhere – or, in the words of one of the orchestra’s violinists Joseph Böhm, ‘he threw himself back and forth like a madman’. Böhm further remembered, ‘he stretched to his full height, at the next he crouched down to the floor. He flailed about with his hands and feet as though he wanted to play all the instruments and sing all the chorus parts.’ Helène Grebner, a young member of the chorus, recalled that Beethoven’s timekeeping may have been a little tardy: although he ‘appeared to follow the score with his eyes, at the end of each movement he turned several pages together’. On one occasion, possibly at the end of the second movement, the contralto Caroline Unger had to tug on Beethoven’s shirt to alert him to the applause behind him; these days the audience holds its approval until the end of the entire piece, but in those days praise arrived at regular intervals. Beethoven, still facing the orchestra, had apparently not heard the clapping, or was too busy readying his score for the adagio. Could this really have happened? Or was this last story a myth subtly amplified by time?1 The performance throws up bigger questions too. How could one so profoundly deaf compose a piece of music that would send almost all who heard it into raptures? Beethoven’s secretary Anton Schindler wrote how ‘never in my life did I hear such frenetic yet cordial applause . . . The reception was more than imperial – for the people burst out in a storm four times.’2 A reviewer in the Wiener Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung suggested that Beethoven’s ‘inexhaustible genius had shown us a new world’. Everyone – friends, critics, the whipped-up cream of Viennese connoisseurship – had delightedly thrown their hats in the air. But had they heard what the composer intended? And have we?
We know the score. The first movement in sonata form that never settles down, the orchestra in an elemental battle with itself, the hovering tension of the first gentle bars soon colliding with the full swaggering crescendo that announces a work of unshakeable emotional force. The second movement, the scherzo, a juggernaut of engaging and urgent rhythm before the controlled and heart-stoppingly beautiful melody of the slow third. And then the last visionary movement, the stirring optimism of Schiller’s Ode to Joy, thunderous as to Heaven, a rhapsodic symphony in itself, described by the German critic Paul Bekker as rising ‘from the sphere of personal experience to the universal. Not life itself portrayed, but its eternal meaning.’
But how well do we really know the score?
The notes are one thing, the tempo quite another. The symphony has long become part of the landscape. It has an official title: ‘Symphony No. 9 in D Minor’, and the catalogue number Opus 125; it has a vernacular title: the ‘Choral’, and an insiders’ shorthand title ‘B9’. But what it doesn’t have, through all its thousands of performances, is even the loosest of agreements on its timing. Just how aggressively should the second movement be played? And how sluggishly the third? By what electrifying licence can Toscanini drive home the fourth movement more than five minutes faster than the relatively glacial interpretation by Klemperer? How can one conductor from the nineteenth century get the audience home a comfortable 15 minutes earlier than one in the twenty-first century? How can Felix Weingartner conduct the Ninth with the Vienna Philharmonic in February 1935 at a lick of 62.30, Herbert von Karajan lead the Berlin Philharmonic in the autumn of 1962 in 66.48, and Bernard Haitink and the London Symphony manage 68.09 in April 2006? What about Simon Rattle’s take of 69.46 back in Vienna in 2003? And then there are the live recordings complete with pauses and coughing between movements – most famously Leonard Bernstein conducting a multinational orchestra in Berlin on Christmas Day 1989 to mark the fall of the Wall, the performance at which the word ‘joy’ was replaced by the word ‘freedom’ at the choral finale, clocking in at a remarkable 81 minutes 46 seconds. Has our patience for the symphony expanded against all the faster odds in our modern world? Does our modern appreciation of genius demand that we savour every note?
The glory of music rests as much with its interpretation as its composition, and it is the interpretation that supplies the life force. Art cannot be reduced to absolutes; emotion cannot be measured in a timescale. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the method of interpreting contemporary music changed, and Beethoven’s impatience and radicalism had much to do with it. The composer found a new way of marking time.
Although each movement of the Ninth Symphony carries the usual form of general introductory guidance for tempo and mood, even the casual listener will acknowledge the inadequacy of these instructions for such a varied and unconventional piece. The first movement plumps for ‘Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso’ (lively and joyous, but not too much so, and then a tad stately); the second ‘Molto vivace’ (very fast and forceful); the third ‘Adagio molto e cantabile’ (slow and lyrical); and the fourth, with its groundbreaking choral finale, ‘Presto – Allegro ma non troppo – Vivace – Adagio cantabile’ (trippingly fast, lively but steady, slow and sweet).
Where did these tempos come from? From the human heartbeat and the human stride. Any definition of tempo required a baseline from which to operate – the tempo giusto from where one may either run fast or slow. An accepted average for both a leisurely stroll and a relaxed heart rate stood at around 80 beats per minute (bpm), and this was considered a ‘normal’ place to start. (In 1953 the fabled music historian Curt Sachs suggested that there was an upper and lower limit which prevented a concert performance descending or accelerating into incomprehension. ‘The maximum of slowness, which still allows for a steady step or beat, is possibly 32 (bpm) . . . and the maximum of speed, beyond which the conductor would fidget rather than beat, is probably 132.’ Sachs also made his own table, approximate at best but certainly original, linking precise bpm with vague terminology. Unfortunately, it slightly contradicted his estimation above. Thus he calculated that adagio would be 31 bpm, andantino 38, allegretto 53 ½ and allegro 117.3
It was the Italians who introduced the descriptions of tempo we’re still familiar with (all those vivaces and moderatos), and by 1600 the moods of classical music were well established. Emotions were no longer merely intuited but inscribed: ‘gaily’ (allegro) and ‘at leisure’ (adagio). When he played in Bologna in 1611, Adriano Banchieri’s organ scores already carried very particular instructions for presto, più presto and prestissimo. Fifty years later the musical vocabulary stretched to the most staccato nervoso and the most beautiful fuso (‘melting’). The fabled link to the heartbeat found further resonance in the Italian term for a quarter-rest: sospiro, a breath or a sigh.
But there was a problem: emotions are pliable things, and they didn’t always translate from composer to conductor. Nor did they translate between nations. In the 1750s, C.P.E. Bach, son of Johann Sebastian, found that ‘in certain countries [outside Germany] there is a marked tendency to play adagios too fast and adagios too slow.’ Some twenty years later, a young Mozart found that when he performed in Naples his interpretation of presto was so unparalleled that the Italians assumed that his virtuosity was somehow connected to his magic ring (which he then removed to rule out foul play).
By the 1820s we know that Beethoven regarded these instructions as perfunctory and outmoded. In a letter to the musician and critic Ignaz von Mosel in 1817, he suggested that the Italian terms for tempo had been ‘inherited from times of musical barbarism’.
For example, what can be more absurd than Allegro, which once and for all means cheerful, and how far removed we are often from the true meaning of this description, so that the piece of music itself expresses the very opposite of the heading! As far as these four main connotations are concerned [allegro, andante, adagio, presto], which, however, are far from being as right or as true as the main four winds, we would do well to dispense