The BBC Music Magazine Interview
Sir Roger Norrington
Tom Service talks to conductor Sir Roger Norrington about a life of studying and rethinking Beethoven
Conductors aren’t supposed to do it like Roger Norrington. Instead of veiling himself on his podium in a shroud of sublime concentration, Norrington’s performances are invitations for all of us to join in. He breaks the fourth wall of the concert hall with delicious naughtiness, turning round to the audience with a wink and an embracing gesture to emphasise the gag that Haydn or Berlioz has just played on us, like a magician revealing how a trick is done. ‘I can’t not do it – I want to share it. A concert is a joint enterprise with the audience, isn’t it?’
It is. But try telling that to many of the high priests of his profession, for whom any acknowledgement of the public during their performance is tantamount to an admission that – shock horror – the rituals of the concert hall are made by human beings rather than by transcended spirits in a state of supine genuflection to the music they’re performing. And if there’s one composer whose works seem to require that obeisance, it’s the tousle-haired, grimacefaced misanthrope whose two-and-a-half centuries the musical world is celebrating this year: Beethoven. Beethoven! All those busts and all those box sets, all that marmoreal hagiography, all those clichéd exclamations of genius and revolutionary fervour, all that desperate seriousness.
But those aren’t the ways that Norrington sees, hears and plays Beethoven. ‘The thing about Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, is that their material is wit. That’s what they’re talking about. Beethoven isn’t early Wagner – it’s late Haydn. It’s the same language.’ Among many things, it’s the quicksilver connection with earlier traditions that Norrington wants you to hear in his recordings of the Beethoven symphonies, whether that’s his pioneering set with the period instruments of the London Classical Players (LCP) from the 1980s, or on the modern instruments of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony from
the early 21st century. ‘When we recorded the Eroica [with the LCP], people said,
“it doesn’t sound very heroic”. Well, we thought it was very heroic to play it like that at all – to perform it at Beethoven’s metronome markings, on those instruments, finding new techniques to make old technology work.’
Norrington’s performances rethought the conventional image of Beethoven’s symphonies because they rejected epic struggling and monumentalised dimensions of sound and scale. As he says, ‘heroes don’t have to be bronze statues in the middle of a garden, surrounded by railings.’ His performances of the symphonies over the last 40 years don’t stage a confrontation with a composer separated from the rest of humanity by a bridge of sublimity, but instead let us get up close to the white-heat of the music. They thrill with a spirit of novelty, appropriate for these pieces that Norrington describes as ‘adventures – and each of the nine is different, they all inhabit new worlds’.
And a new world is exactly what it felt like to Norrington and his London Classical Players painstakingly laying down ten minutes of a take after three hours of preparation, exploring the terra incognita of taking Beethoven’s metronome markings, and executing those speeds on their historical instruments without hesitation or deviation. ‘It was like crossing America for the first time. It was incredibly thrilling, because you can only be the pioneers once. And the great thing it gave us was creativity. We had to be creative, because we had brand new material, and we didn’t pretend we knew the answers.’ He’s happily surprised with the results of the LCP sessions, even today. ‘I occasionally put them on in fear and trembling: they can’t be that good, can they? But then out comes this extraordinary brilliance of playing.’
Those recordings still blaze with the shock of the new. But Norrington is clear that those debates around whether his – or Andrew Parrott’s, or John Eliot Gardiner’s, or Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s – is the one and only ‘authentic’ Beethoven are wrongheaded. ‘There is no absolute authenticity.’ Yet he is equally clear, decades later, that there is a categorically right and wrong way to play his music. He says that what he does is ‘evidence-based music’, comparable to ‘evidence-based medicine’.
That leads to the alarming thought that the way other conductors play Beethoven might not only be aesthetically problematic, but bad for your musical or even physical health. It’s certainly bad for Norrington’s. ‘I can do without the wrong way, and I don’t have to listen to these extraordinarily traumatic performances’ – he means the tradition of the Romanticists like Arthur Nikisch and Wilhelm Furtwängler, opposed to the supposedly objective Felix Weingartner and Arturo Toscanini. ‘Toscanini was the nearest thing to historically informed when I was young.’
But speed is just the start. There are plenty of other crazy facts that Norrington lists as rules of Beethovenian right and wrong: ‘the size of the orchestra, the
balance, the soundworld – once you get all those rules right, then you can be free.’ That sounds like a paradox. ‘You feel free because you’re following the rules. That’s what rules are for in society. They’re there to help you behave. Once you have all that information in place, you’re free to leap all over the music, but you won’t make silly mistakes. You won’t go super slow in the Eroica’s funeral march, because it’s not in four, it’s in a slow two. All marches are in two, because we have two feet. Maybe dogs march in four, but we don’t.’ A brilliant image and a description that seems to defy criticism. But he’s just warming up. ‘All that frees you up, so then you can bring all your energy and joy to bear on these pieces. But the only thing you really have to add in performance is the phrasing, the gesture.’
Which means that although Norrington feels the same excitement and spontaneity he always has done in front of these pieces, and a composer he calls ‘a giant of the human spirit’, the shape of his interpretation hasn’t changed over the decades. It’s a fact borne out if you compare the Stuttgart and the LCP recordings. From live performances, the Stuttgart cycle breathes in bigger arcs, and proves that an orchestra of modern instruments, playing in Norrington’s vibrato-less pure-tone style – another of his ‘facts’ of orchestral performance practice – can create the same transparent texture as a band of historically accurate instruments. But the fundamental interpretation hasn’t changed.
Interpretation: that’s a word that Norrington can’t agree with. ‘You don’t need an interpretation, you just need to get it right. The music should come crashing through without the conductor or the performers making it too much their own.’
Now whenever conductors say this kind of thing, you need to take it with a generous spadeful of salt. Because they all say that they’re merely vessels for the bigger work of the composer to flow through them and their musicians, however wildly divergent their views on every dimension of the music might be. How can they all be right? Norrington does admit that ‘the thing about performance is you have to use your personality: that’s the only way of doing it, but it can’t get in the way’, yet he still can’t stomach the idea of his being an ‘interpretation’ understood apart from the ‘facts’ of Beethoven’s scores.
Which presents another Norrington paradox. This most iconoclastic and generously impish of conductors is a firm believer in articles of musical faith: he lays down strictures of tempo, of sonority and approach that limit the permissible range of Beethovenian experience.
The musicologist Richard Taruskin wrote a brilliant article in 1989 about
Norrington’s Beethoven, ‘Resisting Beethoven’s Ninth’, which is a forensic analysis of the deep work of interpretation that Norrington’s LCP recordings create. He sees Norrington’s project as a fundamentally modernist one, rejecting Romantic sublimity for the ‘inspired literalism’ of a Beethoven bounded by the evidence, the facts of the notes on the page.
Those facts are meaningless without performance. And Norrington’s continually renewed radicalism is more essential than ever. Thanks to him, no conductor today can claim not to have heard the evidence that Beethoven’s metronome markings are to be taken seriously; no listener can fail to be gobsmacked by those recordings’ energy, precision and illumination. Yet the image of Beethoven is perhaps more ossified than ever, as the classical music industry varnishes its favourite icon, suffocating music’s most powerful personality in layers of hagiographical repetition and reheated performances. It’s the opposite of what Norrington stands for. If he is ‘resisting’ anything, it’s not the Ninth Symphony, but the unthinking cult of Beethoven.
That takes me back to that twinkle – that look, that invitation to the audience is as challenging as it is charming. In performance, those moments reveal the uncontainable spirit of Beethoven’s music especially clearly, but that’s what Norrington is doing in every bar. His gift is to make us part of the composition, to fold us into the experience, to recognise ourselves in these symphonies.
Mind you, that’s in the music too: Norrington’s favourite Beethoven – ‘the greatest piece ever written’ – is the Missa solemnis. Norrington is an atheist, but he goes into something close to a spiritual reverie when he says ‘there’s a deep sense of awe in that piece. He had direct contact with his God. The flute and violin descending from on high in the Benedictus, those extraordinary fugues in the Creed. I just find it incredibly moving. Almost enough to make you believe.’ He may not believe in God, but Norrington believes in Beethoven.
Norrington and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony’s recordings of Beethoven Symphonies 1-9 for the SWR label will be available in April in a five-cd set
‘The only thing you really have to add in performance is the phrasing, the gesture’