Music Richard Osborne
THE SILENT MUSICIAN
Orchestral musicians hate being lectured. ‘Klemps, you talka too much’ was the celebrated put-down delivered, fist raised, by Bruno Labate, the New York Philharmonic’s diminutive first oboe, to the loquacious and gangling Otto Klemperer (6ft 6in in his stocking feet) during a rehearsal in 1935.
Anecdotes, of which Beecham was the great master, yes; lectures, no.
Yet now I read that musicians from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment are preparing to talk to us before concerts. ‘NEW!’ screamed the press release. ‘OAE Shakes Up Concert Hall Convention as Players and Conductors Talk from Stage.’ The Daily Telegraph went further: ‘Orchestra to take informal approach in effort to break down etiquette barriers.’
I don’t know about you but I’ve always been rather fond of etiquette, not least in the recital room and concert hall.
How we listen, and how musicians expect us to listen, is one of many questions raised in The Silent Musician (Faber, £14.99), a remarkable book whose interest extends far beyond its rather too insistent subtitle, Why Conducting Matters.
The author is Mark Wigglesworth, a conductor of proven experience and sensibility, albeit one with a reputation for being something of a stormy petrel where managements are concerned. Not here, however. Throughout this thoughtfully conceived and beautifully written disquisition, argument is balanced with counter-argument at almost every turn.
Take the OAE’S worries about audiences. Wigglesworth acknowledges the dangers of a disconnect between listeners and players. Yet in the very next paragraph he warns that ‘devaluing the sense of occasion will certainly not help increase [music’s] popularity’. Informal chat can do just that. I remember asking Alfred Brendel whether he enjoyed his rare forays into talking about music. He gave me one of his quizzical looks and replied, ‘I believe it is necessary occasionally in one’s life to try to do the impossible.’
It certainly is difficult. Hence the rarity value of those masters of the broadcast music talk, Sir Walford Davies in the interwar years, and Antony Hopkins, whose Home Service, later Radio 3, series Talking about Music ran for almost 40 years, until his dismissal in 1992 drove another nail into the coffin of music education for the lay listener.
Wigglesworth contends that, since art raises ideas that entertainment encourages us to ignore, musicians should treasure the fact that their audiences need to work harder than other audiences. And so we do, poring over sleeve notes and well-thumbed guides. Indeed, in the age before surtitles (which Wigglesworth rightly, if unavailingly, deplores), we used to bone up on foreign-language libretti
(or Kobbé) before any opera performance.
Not that the idea of self-help has quite been abandoned. Witness the recent publication by Yale University Press of its 950-page The Classical Music Lover’s Companion to Orchestral Music, a collection of authoritatively written programme essays on some 400 works by 68 composers from Bach to Webern. (No Zemlinsky, alas.) The essays are the work of Robert Philip, a long-serving lecturer at the Open University and a valued former contributor to Radio 3’s Record Review, itself a rich source of musical knowledge intravenously acquired.
Nowadays (‘market research’ tells us) young folk feel ‘alienated’ from the concert-hall experience. Perhaps so. Wigglesworth cites a young woman who complained that she didn’t know ‘where to look’ during concerts. He reminds his readers (but was far too polite to tell the young woman herself) that the word ‘audience’ derives from audire, to hear. He might have added that hearing precedes sight in the human experience, though for the great majority of people the eye’s hegemony quickly takes over after birth.
Wigglesworth worries that music, ‘which is older than agriculture’, has become too much a ‘virtual’ experience, as opposed to a live encounter heard in ‘a closed space in which we discover an infinite one’.
Herbert von Karajan, one of Wigglesworth’s more distinguished predecessors, thought likewise. The most recorded conductor in history, Karajan loved the private space for listening that the gramophone affords. Nor was he averse to mocking the irritations of concert-going: ‘In front of the person to the left a lady flicks her bracelet, and to the right someone is trying to read the score (on the wrong page) beating the (wrong) time with his programme. Behind sits someone who has not been able to find a parking spot and is still complaining about it to his neighbour…’
‘But what,’ Karajan asked, ‘would our profession be, and our relentless efforts for music, if we did not stand in direct contact with those who love music?’
Provided, that is, the musicians are performing and not yacking on.