Michael Tanner | The Spectator columnists & writers

A new recording throws fresh light on Mahler’s puzzling Tenth Symphony

There are many Symphonies No. 10 by Gustav Mahler, or none. The situation is rare, if not unique, in the history of music. Basic facts: Mahler finished the Ninth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde in the summer of 1910. At the same time he discovered that his wife Alma was having an affair with Gropius, and that he had an incurable heart complaint and hadn’t long to live. One might have thought that these last two completed works are as movingly valedictory as anything ever written, but Mahler’s view was more complicated than that, and he immediately set about writing a Tenth Symphony. Over and among the notes, he scrawled messages to Alma, God and even the Devil, anguished pleas and expressions of despair. The symphony was designed, it seems, to mark a new departure, but what might this new departure be? It looked for many years as if we would never know Mahler’s solution, genuine or attempted, to that question.

Slanging match: rein GOLD, by Elfriede Jelinek, reviewed

I’ve tried hard to think of someone I dislike enough to recommend this novel* to, but have failed. Elfriede Jelinek is Austria’s leading contemporary literary figure, and to open rein GOLD at random is to get the impression that she is the successor to Thomas Bernhard — page after page without a single paragraph indentation, a general ranting tone, maddening repetitiveness, and cult status. Just in case Jelinek’s is an unfamiliar name: she is an extremely neurotic person, a sufferer from many phobias — unable to travel to collect her Nobel Prize; a copious writer, many of her books having been translated into English among other languages; and, most significantly, one of those authors whose favourite idiom is humourless parody.

The grotesque unevenness of Mozart’s Requiem

It is amazing what fine performances you can get beamed to your computer these days. Slightly less amazing is the packaging these events come in, when they do. ENO relayed free a concert of Mozart’s Requiem, but it was preceded by a snatch of Strictly, with a row of muscular young guys ripping off their shirts, before we entered the Coliseum for a heavily pregnant Danielle de Niese hyping the event we were about to see and hear. She is delightful, but I wish she hadn’t been compelled to tell us that, despite his hard life, Mozart was sending us a message of hope that everyone, however ignorant of classical music, can be moved by. It’s just not true. Great music, which some of the Requiem is, demands total concentration and preferably some knowledge of the idiom, but not of the agonising circumstances in which it was composed.

Why imperfect operas like Don Carlo are more interesting than perfect ones

In the 62 years since I first heard and saw Don Carlo, in the famous and long-lasting production by Visconti at the Royal Opera, my feelings about it have grown ever stronger, both in passionate attachment and in critique. Imperfect operas, like other imperfect phenomena, can be more interesting than perfect ones, because they’re more thought-provoking, more enticing. The libretto, very freely based on Schiller’s play, was by two Frenchmen, and Verdi, eager to make a bigger splash than he had so far in Paris, made too much of one. The first performance, in 1867, ran so late that the members who lived outside central Paris missed their last trains, which were at 12.35 a.m. (Royal Opera and ENO: please take note).

The best recordings of the greatest symphony

I am daunted. Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony is a work that I regard with love, awe and even anxiety. I always wonder whether I’ll be able to cope with such large and deep demands on me and, if I hear a performance or recording that doesn’t disappoint me, be able to articulate why I find it so powerful, one of the supreme masterpieces of Western music, the greatest of symphonies. With musical works that one has the strongest kinship with, there is, as everyone finds, an urgent need to locate the qualities that make it so penetrating an experience, combined with misery at the gap between how one responds and what one feels able to say. What I have usually done when I have been overwhelmed by Bruckner Eight, but still frustrated about being unable to express why I find it so wonderful but imponderable, has been to get another recording or listen to another broadcast or, as occasionally happens, attend a performance of it.

Michael Tanner remembers the greatest musical experience of his life

No surprise: the greatest musical experience of my life was Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1962. I thought at the time that I would never again be so moved by a performance of anything. I have kept an open mind ever since, and still it takes me no time or effort to answer the question. Obviously I can’t discuss here why I regard Parsifal as a supreme work, but even if I thought that Wagner had written greater ones, or that some other master composer had — in fact, I do think there are several works by four composers that are as great as Parsifal, though at that altitude rankings and comparisons become absurd — what I experienced in Bayreuth that year was unique and unpredictable. One of the things that made the Bayreuth experience exceptional, which is wholly missing today, was the town itself.

Why do Radio 3 presenters adopt the tone stupid adults use when addressing children?

Anyone who has listened regularly to Radio 3 over the decades — not to mention the Third Programme, which Radio 3 replaced in 1967, and which provided an incomparable musical education for many of us — can’t have failed to notice the change in style and standard of presentation. Listening to any radio announcer from 50 years ago is bound to cause hilarity: carefully read scripts, un-emotional delivery; all told, quite like the Queen’s Christmas broadcast. It would be ridiculous to expect no change in the way that the music, and the occasional talks, not to mention the regular poetry programme — a northern camp Thursday-night regular — are presented. Nowadays even the golden voice of Patricia Hughes might be regarded as comic, and I can’t imagine any listener turning on the radio for the sake of the announcer as well as the music they are ‘presenting’.

Shock tactics | 30 May 2019

Igor Levit has rapidly achieved cult status, as he certainly deserves. He has already reached the stage where he can programme enormous and pretty obscure works, such as Ronald Stevenson’s Passacaglia. Clearly, Levit’s taste runs to large-scale works, but his recently released disc, Life, shows his command of shorter pieces too. His first concert in this run of three was Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a performance that commanded an instant hush and was greeted with almost unseemly cheering and stamping from the Wigmore audience. Levit began this masterpiece in a remarkably quiet way, almost casually, but with an amazing singing tone. Indeed, except for the punctuating rigorous canons, he cultivated cantabile throughout, his journey into the depths of this fathomless work being as different as possible from either of Glenn Gould’s recordings, long the gold standard for the Goldbergs.

A moral hypochondriac

Surely God, if He existed, would find a major source of entertainment down the ages in the activities of theologians, reaching their climax perhaps in the 19th century, when they involved Him with German idealism, and then the descent from that to the present day, when the sheer naivete of anyone who thinks that God is ‘out there’ or actually exists, in some sense we can understand, provokes genial and condescending ridicule from the professionals. Central to the development of thought about Christianity is the work of the melancholy Dane Søren Kierkegaard, who in the course of his short life — he died, aged 42, in 1855 — wrote more books and notebooks than many of us succeed in reading in a longer lifetime. Most of his books were issued under an assortment of bemusing pseudonyms, Johannes Climacus, for instance.

Sister act | 17 April 2019

Total immersion weekends can prove tricky. The established masters don’t need them, while lesser-known figures often turn out to be relatively obscure for sound reasons. Nonetheless, there are plenty of composers whose works are too rarely performed, not so much through neglect as because of the awkwardness of their demands — huge orchestras and choruses, or unlikely combinations of forces. The Boulangers present in all respects a special case. Lili, the marvellously gifted composer, died at the age of 24, while her sister Nadia, who gave up composition after some early successes because she wisely realised that she was no match for her sister, went on ‘mentoring’, in one way or another, countless musicians, performers and composers, especially North Americans, from Copland to Carter, with some influence on Stravinsky along the way.

Sinking the unsinkable

Garrick Ohlsson is one of the finest pianists of his generation. Why, then, was the Wigmore Hall not much more than half full for his recital last week? Brahms. Ohlsson is at present touring with four programmes, all Brahms’s solo piano music. He treated us mainly to solid chunks, though he ended with the enchanting and almost light-hearted Paganini Variations, fiendish for Ohlsson but enlivening for us. Actually, he played an encore by Chopin, the solitary Op. 45 Prelude, preceding it with a charming lecturette about how Brahmsian, avant la lettre, Chopin could be. Ohlsson was a student of the great Claudio Arrau, whose attitude to Brahms verged on the frosty. Arrau adored the First Piano Concerto, and there are many recordings of it by him, but it is Brahms at his least typical, especially the huge raging first movement.

Licensed to trill

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of approach to performing Schubert’s Winterreise, though sometimes there’s doubt or dispute about which one a given performer has taken. According to Jonas Kaufmann, Hans Hotter, for me the greatest of all performers of the cycle, as of so much else, insisted that the performer should be a narrator, not the Wanderer himself. But Kaufmann rightly insisted that Hotter’s various recordings are dramatic, with Hotter enacting, not narrating the monodrama. So it’s not always easy to tell. There was no doubt, though, in Christian Gerhaher’s recent performance of the cycle at the Wigmore Hall, with his long-time accompanist Gerold Huber, that we were witnessing the journey and sufferings presented directly.

Janacek’s rare gem

Janacek’s upsetting opera Katya Kabanova, which hasn’t been seen in the UK for some time, turned up in two different productions over the weekend, with a third to follow in Scotland. The Opera North production by Tim Albery dates from 2007, when it was conducted by Richard Farnes with the clarity and passion which characterises all his work. This revival had Sian Edwards making her Opera North debut, and all told it had a slightly muted quality. The paradoxical jagged lyricism of Janacek’s orchestral writing only struck home intermittently, and there were stretches which could almost have been by Smetana, against whom Janacek partly defined himself. Albery’s production and Hildegard Bechtler’s sets remain serviceable and convey the oppressive atmosphere of the work without drawing attention to themselves, with the sombre colours of the natural world contrasting subtly with the gloom of the interiors.

A true labour of love

The write stuff | 20 September 2018

No one any longer denies the immense significance of Wagner’s musical-dramatic achievement, even if they find it repellent. But his reputation as a writer — of operatic texts, autobiographical and biographical memoirs, practical essays on how to conduct particular pieces, vast and less vast theoretical works, ranging from speculations on opera and climate to theologico-political musings — is not high. Nor should it be, except for the more ‘occasional’ pieces. He was in fact a major contributor to mauvaises lettres, and no kind of systematic thinker, however much he might have liked to be. His only prose that is consistently readable comes in his letters, some of them enormous, all of them full of life and colour.

Too much information | 12 July 2018

When Kasper Holten’s production of Don Giovanni was first staged at the Royal Opera in 2014, I disliked it intensely, even more than I have disliked most of his other productions, or for that matter most productions of Don Giovanni. I missed the first revival, but when I saw it this time round my reactions were more complex, though I still think there is a lot wrong with it. In the meantime, I have watched the 2014 production on Blu-ray. Holten and Es Devlin the set designer give a commentary throughout, which at least helped me to understand what was intended, even if it didn’t convince me that most of the producer’s ideas are helpful or even realisable. Holten’s key idea is that Giovanni, for all his ebullience, energy, charm and erotic power, is desperately miserable, so much so that by the time we arrive at the Supper scene he is mad, wholly divorced from any awareness of the existence of anyone else, so that the Stone Guest is a figment of his crazed mind, and the hell to which he seems to be dragged down by devils is his total loss of contact with reality.

A labour of loathing

The titans of the podium, a late 19th- and 20th-century phenomenon, a species now extinct, have on the whole been well served by their biographers, with Peter Heyworth’s Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times as the ideal. Wilhelm Furtwängler, by far the greatest of them all in my and many other people’s opinion, has not been nearly so fortunate. Partly that may be due to the nature of his genius, in that in most of his performances, as can still be heard on innumerable recordings, he seems to have a larger part in the creative process than almost any other performer (only Callas and Sviatoslav Richter, both passionate admirers of his, share that feature), and that is considered at least a dubious quality in this time of textual fidelity.

Slippery slope

Longborough Festival Opera, refuge for British Wagnerians fleeing unidiomatic musical performances and idiotically irrelevant and insulting productions, has rounded off its Wagner canon with its first Der fliegende Holländer. Next year a new production of the Ring begins, so presumably the small stage is considered inappropriate for the three Wagner dramas with indispensably large choruses. Not that Holländer can do without a chorus in Act Three, and very impressive it is in this production by Thomas Guthrie, but we only saw the townsfolk, and I think the Dutchman’s crew was pre-recorded, though perfectly synchronised. The conducting was, as always, in the sure and inspired hands of Anthony Negus, and the orchestra, after some blips in the Overture, was superb.

Trivial pursuits | 7 June 2018

‘Is there an end [to this opera] that is not trivial?’ asks the Countess in her final bars of Richard Strauss’s last opera Capriccio. Given the previous two and a half hours, the answer would seem to be a decided no. It is a frothy confection even by the standards of his later operas, the better parts reminiscent of the Prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos and some of Arabella. One thing to be said in its defence is that Strauss’s writing it in 1941–2 is no criticism of him or of the work. People make a fuss about that, but do they think he should have produced an heroic piece — something he had already done, unfortunately — or another work in favour of peace, like the disastrous Friedenstag of 1938? Capriccio is the kind of thing he was best at, charming, inconsequential, chatty with occasional outbursts of orchestral sumptuousness, though surely, at nearly two and a half hours, too long.

Lessons in refrigeration

There is no such thing as a moderately good performance of Madama Butterfly, or, to be more precise, it’s not possible to be slightly or rather moved by a performance. As with some of Shakespeare’s plays, and most of Wagner’s music-dramas, one is either shaken and overcome, or refrigerated and indifferent. So it’s sad to report that Glyndebourne’s first ever Butterfly, toured in 2016 but now settling on home ground, is a stolid, undistinguished affair, with some decent moments and much that seems routine and a fair amount that is worse than that. Is it a good idea to update an opera that is set in Nagasaki to the 1950s, when the city was still reeling from the effects of the second atom bomb? Goro’s office and the tattoo parlour opposite seem to have survived; anyway, the office is where Act One is located, making a nonsense of the opening exchanges between Pinkerton and Goro, as well as introducing an element of sleaze that is the opposite of what Puccini intended.

English Touring Opera’s Il tabarro was the most convincing I have seen

Il tabarro & Gianni Schicchi Cambridge Arts Theatre English Touring Opera brought its production of two of the operas in Puccini's Il trittico to Cambridge recently, as well as Figaro, which unfortunately I wasn't able to go to. The production and performance of Il tabarro was the most convincing I have seen. Usually I feel that with this opera Puccini is worthily doing something different from any of his previous operas, and incidentally creating the only work which can justly be said to be verismo – a term ludicrously used for such markedly untruthful works as Andrea Chenier and Adriana Lecouvreur, as well as Puccini's earlier works. With Il tabarro he virtually becomes the Zola of opera, grimly portraying the precarious and tedious life of bargees on the Seine.

Hot and seedy

Salome is my favourite opera by Richard Strauss, the only one where there is no danger, at any point, of his lapsing into good taste, which there is to some degree in all his other operas, even if only momentarily. With Salome, from the opening quiet clarinet slithering upwards, and the luckless young Syrian Narraboth, later in the work to stab himself to death without anyone noticing, remarking for the first of many times how beautiful the princess Salome is tonight, we know we are in for a mischievous orgy of lust and violence. The work’s chromaticism isn’t used to make particular expressive points but to create and sustain an atmosphere so hot and seedy that we are prepared for anything to happen. And Strauss rewards us always — in as fine a performance as the one we had in Leeds last week — in excess of expectation, however often we might have heard or seen the piece.

The lady vanquishes

At last, a great time at the Royal Opera: a magnificent performance, in every way, of Verdi’s Macbeth, curiously but pleasantly beginning at 3 p.m. This is the fourth outing of Phyllida Lloyd’s 2002 production, and the finest by a long way, though each of the previous series had its merits. If my memory serves me rightly, and it very likely doesn’t, Daniel Dooner, the revival director, has made significant changes to the production. What previously struck me as tolerable seemed, in this revival, thoughtful, imaginative and genuinely helpful to the drama, qualities that I had given up hope of experiencing in a major opera house. Oddly, that meant that the striking unevenness of this opera became more evident, with the blame to be laid firmly at the composer’s door.

Love Handel

Handel’s Rinaldo has not been highly regarded even by his most ardent admirers. I have never understood why — even less so after the recent performance at the Barbican, with stunning forces, including the English Concert, under the inspiring direction of Harry Bicket. Certainly the plot is absurd, with a last-minute mass conversion of Muslims to Christianity in order to bring things to a happy conclusion. But there are only six main characters in complicated relationships with one another, turning on their love and hatred like a switch, and going through the usual hoops; that is what Handel operas are. The penny has dropped with me, almost too late, that it is a complete mistake to look for characterisation in Handel.

Gallic pieties

My two attempts to see Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites at the Guildhall School were frustrated by the weather. Forced back on to my DVDs and CDs — vinyl, even — I took the opportunity to survey some of the manifestations and investigations of religious feeling in 20th-century French music. I began with Vincent d’Indy’s Fervaal, an opera he composed in 1895 which used to be referred to as ‘the French Parsifal’. Refreshing my memory of the plot by looking it up in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, I was struck by the writer’s insistence that, while the work is heavily influenced by Wagner, ‘[d’Indy] had a better sense of dramatic pacing than Wagner, and more essential humanity’. That sent me back to my private recording of Fervaal, the only one there’s ever been, and two hours of mild amusement at the flagrancy of d’Indy’s indebtedness to what all Frenchmen were by then calling the wizard of Bayreuth, and my fairly strong boredom at how little purpose he put it to.

No sense of direction

The new production of Bizet’s Carmen at the Royal Opera has received mixed reviews. It shouldn’t have done. They should have been unmitigatedly hostile, indignant, outraged — except that all those reactions would almost certainly have delighted the director, Barrie Kosky. What might please him less is the accusation of tedium, of making what often seems an unsinkable work into a colossal bore. This Carmen lasts for three-and-a-half hours and feels as long as that after the first 20 minutes. The whole and only set is a stage-wide flight of 16 steep stairs, up and down which the cast has to run at frightening speeds. As Jakub Hrusa, the conductor, dashed into the opening bars, hectic rather than brilliant, one wondered what might be added on-stage.

Get Carter | 1 February 2018

Das Rheingold at the Royal Festival Hall was, all told, a disappointment, but it might not have been had there been one or two more rehearsals, and a replacement of one of the singers. Vladimir Jurowski plans to perform the whole Ring cycle in due course with the LPO, but he needs to remember that memories are still very fresh indeed of Opera North’s transcendently wonderful performance at the same venue in 2016. That showed, among other things, that you can semi-stage the Ring cycle with some imaginative lighting, a minimum of meaningful movement and no props. This new Rheingold looked, for the first few minutes after the Prelude — superbly played, and for once faithful to Wagner’s dynamic markings — as if there was going to be some interaction among the singers, with the Rhinemaidens singing to one another and taunting Alberich.

Body language | 25 January 2018

One of the Royal Opera’s greatest virtues is the care it takes with its revivals, even those that are virtually annuals, such as Jonathan Kent’s Tosca, the unnecessary replacement for Zeffirelli’s classic production. Kent’s version, with elaborate sets by the much-missed Paul Brown, was unveiled in 2006 and now has its ninth revival. It is a sloppy affair — three stars thrown together on the stage and told to get on with it. Since there is plenty of furniture around, and two precipitous flights of stairs, that isn’t as easy as it would be in any other UK production. When movements onstage are as haphazard as they were on the first night, one realises how physical a piece Tosca is, with entrances, exits, claspings of assorted kinds, all significant and crucial for sustaining tension.

Les Troyens

Grade: A- Berlioz’s Les Troyens, one of the greatest operatic masterpieces, manages to be neglected even if it is quite often performed. The vast reputations of the most popular operatic composers seem to grow ever larger with the years, but Berlioz somehow always needs defending. Listening to this latest CD set, ‘live’ from Strasbourg, I was struck as always by the magnificence of much of the music, and the characteristic lurches into banality or irrelevance that account, I suspect, for the work being so often underrated. But when you get to the last half-hour, Aeneas’s departure for Rome, and Dido’s rage, misery, curses, sudden accesses of calm, fresh outbursts, serene acceptance of utter loss, and final doomed realisation of Rome’s triumph, you find yourself on a level that simply dwarfs most other operas’ attempts at the classical sublime.

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