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Bernard Holland, music critic for The New York Times from 1981-2008, wrote a small profile on Herbert von Karajan in October 1982. The Austrian conductor was 74 at the time and nearing the end of his life. He was a little frail and quite introspective. The whole piece is quite interesting—here’s a bootleg scan on my website if you’d like to read it—but three of his remarks caught my eye.
The first was on Brahms, whose symphonies he was to conduct that weekend in New York City:
“Many people think that Brahms should go just so,” [Karajan] said, waving his arms in rigid time. “But when I was conducting in Aachen as a young man, I was told by a pianist who had heard Brahms himself conduct that his tempos were very free, that you could never predict what would happen from concert to concert. I find these fluctuations of tempo one of the most fascinating sides to music. And with long years of experience—it really comes only with old age—you develop an inner tempo, one that you can change slightly throughout the performance without people knowing it.”
This inner tempo is an elusive paradox. On one hand, the music needs a spine—we don’t want to sound sloppy or induce seasickness in the listener—but on the other, if we want to truly excite their passions, we must play against time, not with it. It’s hard to describe and harder to do—even for Karajan, it only comes with age—but it’s interesting to hear this ideal of temporal freedom passed down from Brahms. It shows up in earlier sources as well, despite our modern notions of Baroque and Classical music as being rigid. I’m reminded of this email exchange on metronomes between harpsichordist Skip Sempé and flutist Jed Wentz, as documented in Sempé’s Memorandum XXI:
From: Skip Sempé
Subject: The Metronome
Date: 4 November 2007Greetings, with a question —
I saw one of Maelzel’s original metronomes in the Hague in a private collection a few weeks ago.
Supposedly there are only 3 or 4 still in existence.
Fascinating object; IT IS SILENT, because that is how Maelzel intended it…
They were never intended to practice with.
So, this is the question: who got the idea that a metronome should tick, and how long have they been ticking?
Skip
From: Jed Wentz
Subject: The metronome
Date: November 5, 2007Hi Skip,
D’Onzembray invented the first ticking metronome, which he called the metrometre, in 1732. It was a flop, because, according to Diderot, you had to play in time with it.
And, he says, there are no 4 bars of an air that have the same tempo. This is in the articles I wrote on French music and rubato for the Tijdschrift Oude Muziek about 12 years ago… (1998, Nos 3 & 4).
All the best,
Jed
Diderot was right. Because you have to play in time with it, the clicking metronome is a failure. With a silent pendulum, you can start at the desired tempo and check with it periodically to make sure you aren’t gaining or losing time, but in the moments between phrases, where the music really happens, you’re free to extemporize. However, if you try to deviate from the authoritarian click, you might find your music sounding rather more avant-garde than you bargained for.
I don’t know when we started teaching students to practice passages—sometimes entire pieces!—with a clicking metronome, but I wonder if that has done more harm than good. I haven’t found my inner tempo yet, but I’m not looking for it in a machine.
Both of these stories are good examples of why it’s worth studying historical sources, or better yet, cultivating some connection to the oral traditions of music: not to blindly recreate the music of the past, but to find ways to escape the clichés of the present.
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The second was on a potential book:
There is a book I want to write—about the elements of music. If I retire, I shall write it, and what I will say about conducting will not be what you think. It will surprise people, but I won’t say anything about it now.
Would it have been a memoir or a treatise, or something in between? In any case, he never ended up publishing it. There’s a meager autobiography, “as told to [read: ghostwritten by] Franz Endler,” but it’s out of print and doesn’t seem to have captured anybody’s imagination. I doubt it’s the book Karajan had in mind here. I wish he had started writing it before he retired, even if it were just gathering notes and scraps—there’s never enough time in the future, especially near the end.1
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The third was on recording technology. When asked about his plans for the future, Karajan replied:
I want to put all my activities in a form that will allow the greatest number of people to participate. When I was a child in Salzburg, subscription concerts attracted maybe 200 to 250 people. I once figured that to equal my audience for one televised or filmed concert program, I would have to conduct the same program before live audiences every day for the rest of my life and then for a whole lifetime more.
I was surprised to hear him saying what we all know, that recordings reach more people than concerts, in such a straightforward manner. He doesn’t share any of the antagonism that Glenn Gould, that other great proselytizer for media, had towards the stage. For Karajan, recordings were a matter of and, not or. He doesn’t have Gould’s academism either—there’s no need to summon Marshall McLuhan from the dead to prove his point. And yet, few have done more than Karajan to advance the cause. Not only is he one of the most recorded artists ever, he also played a significant role in launching the Compact Disc: he encouraged Akio Morita, then the president of Sony, to develop the technology; he organized a press conference during the 1981 Salzburg Festival to flip the skeptics; and he recorded Richard Strauss’ Alpine Symphony for the first test pressing.
That said, I have to admit that I do share Gould’s antagonism towards the stage. I can’t imagine life without my beloved albums, but I’ve yet to give or attend a concert that was truly memorable; any moments that do stick out are strictly extramusical—charming dinners beforehand, raucous afterparties, and so on. I fantasize about the day when I can retreat into my studio and gracefully decline all future engagements. Until then, in the spirit of putting “all my activities in a form that will allow the greatest number of people to participate,” I shall continue to share my imperfectly captured performances.
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A little while back, I recorded excerpts from the Troisième Suite, Op. 2 by Jacques-Martin Hotteterre, a celebrated flute player and builder who served as Chamber Musician to the King of France. The first piece is a Courante, “L’indiferente” with a Double variation. It’s meant to be lively, but not overly fast; I imagine an aloof courtier in Versailles dancing to this, all chin and swagger.
The second piece is a Rondeau, “Le plaintif” (the complainer). I love this one because it sounds like a whinge, and like all good whinges, it’s trivial and increasingly elaborate, but not without a sense of humor.
I had a lovely time playing with Heejin; we also recorded some Bach and Telemann that evening, but that’s a story for another day.
Side note: Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv on Twitter) has a riff he calls write your memoirs. It’s currently a fragment, but it’s worth thinking about. I hope he fleshes it out.
I like to go to concerts. I find them inspiring if the players know what they are doing and if not, well you can always learn something. But I have never experienced a concert so profoundly moving and beautiful as Natalie Haas and Alistair Frazer.
It only comes with age and then we're too tired to use it.