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The death of classical music is often announced. Symphony orchestras are
white-tied, tailcoated relics of an era gone, their sound world is remote to
the young, iPods don’t do Wagner. So the argument goes. Rubbish, of course.
The evidence is all around. As one obvious example think of the enthusiasm
of audiences that greeted the brilliant players of Gustavo Dudamel’s
Venezuelan Youth Orchestra at the Proms and in Edinburgh. They were the
stars of the summer, and they demonstrated that live music in the classical
tradition is still a liberating sound, still capable of all the old power.
Spending part of the last year journeying through our musical history for BBC
Radio 4 and for a book I’ve written, The Making of Music, I’ve been reminded
of how that legacy still lives and why it still inspires. In the grip of a
celebrity culture, where worth is so often measured simply at the
supermarket till or in the size of the tabloid spread, we all need to remind
ourselves of where worth lies – in conviction and persistence. Above all, in
talent.
How wearisome it is to hear the argument about access and “elitism” posed as
if the broadening of the audience and the pursuit of excellence were
opposites, or should be. It is the most destructive of arguments, setting
those who care about quality against those who care about artistic freedom
and a certain kind of democracy, as if they were enemies when they are
usually the same people.
It remains something of a mystery why a football fan is not considered elitist
in asserting that, in general, Arsenal play better football than Accrington
Stanley. It is possible to compare them, and come to a conclusion.
Excellence is what matters, and the reason why doors to concert halls and
opera houses should be opened wider is so that the message can be shouted
more loudly. More people should be encouraged to make their minds up. Music
isn’t there to be lapped up by some supine audience like a doctor’s potion;
it is there to be tasted and assessed, and no one who cares about it should
avoid the responsibility of making a judgment.
The visceral thrill of live music comes in part from the relish of a player or
a singer or an orchestra for performance, and also from the challenge to an
audience to consider what it has heard. Did they pull it off? If there is a
threat to the place of serious music in the future it comes not from the
possibility of composers ceasing to compose – they won’t, for better or
worse – but from a dilution of that excitement. If orchestras don’t adapt,
if concert halls and opera houses don’t find ever more ingenious ways of
competing against other attractions, they will wither on the vine.
Dark days come, like the one in May 2007 that brought the end of EMI, a titan
of the recording industry. It began at the end of the 19th century as the
Gramophone and Typewriter Company and is now in the hands of an equity firm
and probably on its way to Hollywood, there to end up as a piece of a bigger
corporate jigsaw, where it will take its chance with a studio, a TV company
or a sprawling media empire. The smaller recording companies are doing a
magnificent job in bearing the responsibility that’s been thrust on them,
but when a great tree falls, the ground shakes.
This was the company that, in the 1950s, with Decca, preserved on disc the
performances of a generation for an audience that will stretch far into the
future. When Walter Legge recorded Maria Callas in Norma, or Wilhelm
Furtwängler conducting Beethoven’s Choral Symphony at Bayreuth, or Elisabeth
Schwarzkopf singing Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, he was bequeathing a
legacy that will not fade.
Like John Culshaw’s first studio recording of Wagner’s Ring cycle, for Decca,
from 1958, these discs are the precious reminders of performances that
should be allowed to shimmer in the mind for years. They catch for ever a
moment of poignant grief, or laughter, or an orchestral pause of trembling
excitement.
We all remember the moments. I sat once in the early 1980s in the very back
row of the amphitheatre – the gods – at Covent Garden, with my back against
the wall, to watch a production of Verdi’s Otello, with Plácido Domingo in
the title role and Margaret Price as Desdemona. The conductor was Carlos
Kleiber, who would come down from his mountain-top only a few times a year,
for a performance to which he felt committed. He came into the pit, gave a
curt bow, raised his arms and we were off: the opening storm and Otello’s
first cry of “Esultate!” carrying us away.
At the end, more than three hours later, I remember sitting still against the
wall in a kind of trance. What was it that had caused that particular
conductor, on that particular night, to forge that golden pact with the
orchestra? They’d played it often before; everyone knew the score. What had
happened? None of us can know the answer, which is how it should be.
Music involves mystery. Yet composers are real people. They work, they
struggle; they’re sometimes cantankerous and jealous and they aren’t always
nice to their friends. Let’s not imagine that music emerges in some holy
stream from a sacred mountain, flowing towards a temple where devotees can
drink and be cleansed. It is real, sometimes a balm and sometimes an
irritant, a cause of solace but something that can also rouse you to anger
or despair. Above all, music is the product of human inspiration, a force
that’s engaged with the world around us.
Sometimes musical people are tempted to cut themselves off. They are irritated
by a culture that seems to devalue the original and the new, or they feel
easier in the company of those who share their insights and tastes. Just
like those who refuse to open their ears to music they don’t know, or
denigrate the classical tradition because of some imagined “snobbery”,
they’re undermining the spirit that needs to be preserved. Prejudice and
pig-headedness have to be abandoned. Religions preach humility (though some
don’t practise it), and music does the same.
I was struck once when talking to the pianist András Schiff about a cycle of
Beethoven sonatas on which he had just launched. He spoke of how important
the audience was to him, how he would sit in the hall the night before a
concert to take the measure of it and how, at the start of a recital, he
would regard the playing of the first note as the moment when the crucial
engagement was made with the listeners. Without that connection, and the
knowledge that a current was passing between them, all was lost.
He also spoke about his beliefs. As a Hungarian Jew, he left Austria in the
1990s in protest against a particular right-wing lurch and eventually became
a British citizen. He talked with feeling about the importance of his
politics. As he showed me out of his house he gestured towards two grand
pianos side by side in the room where he worked. He put his hand on one of
them – an elegant old instrument – and seemed to offer it a gesture of love.
“That,” he said, “was Furtwängler’s piano.” There was a moment’s silence:
Wilhelm Furtwängler, the stern denizen of Bayreuth and Berlin, who had
stayed (controversially) in Germany through the Hitler years, never giving
the Nazi salute but shaking hands with the Führer, was remembered here, with
awe and humility.
That shared feeling is the gift of music. It is powerful precisely because it
is not abstract, living in a distant sphere, but speaks of people and their
sensibilities. The European tradition is only part of this history of
music-making, which took different paths elsewhere, but it is one of the
great stories, springing from our history. Without it we would live more
impoverished lives, and it isn’t fanciful to say that we need it. That is
why composers and listeners are participants in music. Each needs the other.
It is quite easy at a dull concert, or at some trumped-up show that is all
about style, to sink into gloom. Will the next generation want to sit in
front of an orchestra in white tie and tails? Will the iPod generation
simply find too much to listen to elsewhere? Yet this generation has also an
ear that is tuned to innovation, boldness, risk. Composers and performers
have always adapted, never stopped learning, and have never lost the urge to
make music. There is no reason at all to suppose that in our time, uniquely,
that commitment will disappear. It survives.
James Naughtie’s The Making of Music: A Journey with Notes is published
next Thursday by John Murray, £20
Buy
the book for £18 (including p&p)
