Music Richard Osborne
BERNARD HAITINK THE ENIGMATIC MAESTRO
‘That boy doesn’t know a thing, but he’s a conductor!’
It’s a story Bernard Haitink, 91, has often told but, sad to report, omitted to repeat in John Bridcut’s predictably civilised 90th-birthday tribute, Bernard
Haitink: The Enigmatic Maestro, broadcast on BBC2 in late September.
The title won’t have thrilled Haitink – he’s always loathed the word ‘maestro’ – nor would he have been overjoyed to read that he would be lifting the veil on ‘the secret arts of conducting’. Haitink is the one conductor of standing who’s most likely to tell you that there are no secrets, other than those that dance attendance on any teacher who helps alchemise great art into gold for those he’s privileged to lead.
It was his near-contemporary Sir Colin Davis who pointed out, in a memorable 1994 edition of Anthony Clare’s In the Psychiatrist’s Chair (now a Radio 4 podcast), that conductors come in many guises. He cited preternaturally gifted musicians, such as Karajan, Toscanini and the Greek-born sage Dimitri Mitropoulos, and those who, like himself, had few if any demonstrable skills.
Does it then follow, Clare asked, that conducting, like psychiatry, is a profession that, though not bogus in itself, is capable of being practised by people who are? Does that not apply, Davis countered, to any profession in which an individual is given authority over others? Keenly aware of his own shortcomings, much as Haitink has always been, Davis said his sole claim to authenticity was that he had never pretended to be something he was not. ‘The musicians don’t have to like me, or agree with my view of the music. What they can never say is that I am bogus.’
When Haitink received the call back in 1963, there were those in Amsterdam’s mighty Concertgebouw Orchestra who griped at playing under an inexperienced young Dutchman. Yet they will have known in their gut that he was no impostor.
Haitink brought to the table most of the things that mattered. Good hands, a communicative eye and a thoroughgoing knowledge of music that he’d studied for himself on the page, not vicariously through other people’s recordings. He could also communicate his wishes – and this, indeed, is one of the secrets of the born conductor – without an overdue reliance on words.
If it’s a great orchestra, it will of course have its own rich repository of knowledge. The ensemble Haitink inherited in 1963 had long been revered for its expertise in the symphonic works of Mahler and Bruckner, and in 20thcentury French music. And it was with these repertories that, early on, he made his own distinctive mark.
The Bruckner and Mahler cycles
Bernard Haitink, a born conductor: no secrets but magical communication
he recorded in Amsterdam between 1963 and 1971 already had the feel of recordings that would look well on one’s shelves in decades to come. And so it proved when they were reissued on Haitink’s 65th birthday in 1994 and again, in rather better digital transfers, in 2019.
The Mahler cycle has not been superseded, partly because Haitink himself began to tire of some of the symphonies. ‘We all know there’s better music,’ he later observed, ‘but if you want success as a conductor, you do Mahler, and the louder the better.’ His Bruckner, by contrast – notably his reading of the Seventh Symphony which provides the musical backdrop to Bridcut’s film – has broadened and deepened over time, like a fast-flowing river making its quietus with the greater ocean beyond.
I first met Haitink in Amsterdam in 1968. Five years on from his Concertgebouw appointment, he’d taken up a similar position (to much grumbling in Amsterdam) with the London Philharmonic. I sensed at the time that he felt stultified by Amsterdam. Not by the Concertgebouw, or by the Philips recording team led by the peerless Jaap van Ginneken, but by Amsterdam’s conservative audiences and parochial press.
It was only later that I learned of the traumas he’d experienced during his teenage years – not so much during the Nazi occupation itself as at the time of the liberation when local in-fighting, canting and hypocrisy (powerfully described in Bridcut’s film) came fully into view.
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? The challenges of running London’s increasingly dysfunctional Royal Opera House in the 1990s must have seemed doable to someone whose by now somewhat Hobbesian view of humankind helped steel him to the task.
When the house closed in 1997 – and came near to losing in perpetuity its orchestra and chorus, as the bungled redevelopment plan took its toll – a headline appeared in the Times: ‘Will the Garden ever bloom again?’
A quarter of a century on, faced with yet another crisis, more bungling, and another unsustainable closure, we’re back asking that selfsame question. Will our governments and quangocrats never learn?