800 Words: Evan and Hauptmann Rinderherz discuss the Berlin Philharmonic (part 3)

Evan: So you realize that that list I gave you of the best current conductors is worthless.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Gott sei dank! It was a chamber of horrors!

Evan: That’s a little extreme.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Why have you come back to the side of light?

Evan: Because that list was just a list of general practitioners. In order to make greater music, you need to have specialists who understand the composer on a deep level and take the necessary risks to create true understanding.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: So you admit that our world is diseased and requires the greatness of poettonesoundconsolation to lift us to a better!

Evan: No. I think the world is a hard place, and music helps us through it.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ah! So you do admit it!

Evan: Alright. Sure. I admit that poettone... is that even a word in German? … is helpful.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: ein Sieg fur die Musik!

Evan: But you should understand the reason I did this. The conductors I named are, fundamentally, safe conductors who take no risks. At their best, they combine amazing energy and passion with intellectual rigor. But they take relatively few risks, because they understand that a risk is a risk because it’s usually not successful.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Oh nein. I worry again that you do not understand...

Evan: Maybe not, but I think the real glories of today’s performances of orchestral music are to be found elsewhere.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I’m very afraid to ask where they are?

Evan: Well, let me think...what performances by living and active performers completely changed my understanding of the piece and made me love music even more...hmm... (Herr Hauptmann grows ever more open-mouthed at the list) … Harnoncourt's late Mozart Symphonies, Marc Minkowski’s Messiah, Gardiner’s St. John Passion, Harnoncourt’s Magnificat, Paul McCreesh’s Creation, Rene Jacobs’s Zauberflote, James Levine’s Marriage of Figaro, Gardiner’s Don Giovanni, Paavo Jarvi's Eroica, Thomas Fey’s Pastoral Symphony, Thielemann's Beethoven 7, Blomstedt’s Beethoven 9, Gardiner’s Missa Solemnis, Abbado’s Barber of Seville, Dudamel’s Symphonie Fantastique, Masur’s Italian Symphony,

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Stop! Please Stop!

Evan: I can keep going for another hour at least.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: You have betrayed the greatness of music for the dirtiness and disease of our base, cruel worldtime! .

Evan: Why do you take these things so seriously?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Because music is the food of the soul! Without your soul, you enter the horror of the unclean. You may even start liking Italian Opera!

Evan: I do like Italian Opera!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Grauel!!!

Evan: Suit yourself.

Hauptmann: The worst part is, you do understand the soul of music. In this list great treasures of the spirit there are.

Evan: I’m not even sure the soul exists. But you’re right that music is a serious business and should be taken seriously. But come on man, you sound like you’d burn musical heretics if given half the chance. And do you even believe in God?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I believe in music!

Evan: Touching... really... but if you believe in music, why do you hate so much of it?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Because music is a temple, and we must keep it clean for worship.

Evan: And Wilhelm Furtwangler is it’s prophet?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ja! Furtwangler ist der Gottheit!

Evan: Do you have any idea how ridiculous you’d sound to anybody but me?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Let the outside world dissolve in mist! For us there would yet remain our holy art!

Evan: Holy German art?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: It is not my fault that no other kultur cares for the mysterium tremendum! Every other kultur is obsessed with sex and dirtiness!

Evan: Excessive Russian literature lovers say the same about Russia, Italian art lovers say the same about Italy, Greeks say the same about drama and philosophy, Franch...everything lovers say the same thing about France. No doubt, the time’s coming when Americans begin to say the same thing because of the holy temple of American cinema.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Everything you mention is a glory of the world... except die Franzosich...

Evan: And everything else is besmirched by our diseased world?

Hauptmann Rinderherz:Fast alles.

Evan: Here,... why don’t I put something on for you.

(Evan goes to his laptop, puts on Duke Ellington's Come Sunday)

Evan: Now can you honestly say that this is not food for the spirit?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach! Listen to that scheissetext!

Evan: And Schubert never set a bad text? And Wagner’s own texts aren’t crap?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: And those Falschung Debussy harmonies!

Evan: These harmonies are not Debussy at all! I tried to arrange this for chorus, I couldn’t figure out some of those chords and I have the perfect pitch to pick every note out of a hexachord by ear.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Has anyone ever told you you’re a f*cking ausfall?...

Evan: And who cares about who influenced the harmonies?! It’s what he does with them that matters. And this is some of the most spiritually consoling music since Bach!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: You are deluded. This is Americanischen popularkultur Mull!

Evan: This is not Mull! Here, listen to this... (puts on Old Man River by Jerome Kern)

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Oh Freud, nicht dieser tone!

Evan: The lyrics are truly great by any standard, and so is the song.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: How can you pretend that scheisse is fit for anything but Schweine?

Evan: Because this the opposite of scheisse. It’s a glory of the world.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Next you’ll tell me that Bob Dylan is great!

Evan: He’s not my favorite, but I do love a few of his songs.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: All his music sounds the same!

Evan: So does Mozart’s!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: You are disgusting.

Evan: So’s Parsifal, but I let you listen to it when you want.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I shall not be treated in this manner!

Evan: You want me to stop insulting you?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I want you to stop insulting music!

Evan: You should hear what other music lovers say. Many of them believe Dylan is the Beethoven of American music.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What do I care what they think?

Evan: You’d probably be happier if you did.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I do not seek to be happy! I seek to be uplifted!

Evan: Alright, well try another one. Here’s A Change is Gonna Come from Otis Redding, the American Schubert. It wasn’t written by him but this is my favorite performance.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: How can you think to compare to Schubert when this man did not even write this unbedeutend lied.

Evan: Redding wrote many great songs of his own. But there’s nothing unbedeutend about this song, it’s about the civil rights struggle, and you could even see this as being a song about spiritual hope, or even as a response to the Ode to Joy!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What do Americans know about spiritual hope or joy?

Evan: Most of them know a lot more than you do.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I know the joy of a better world than this one! What is the terribleness of this world compared to the greatness we bring from true music?

Evan: Well you’re listening to true music right now! But you don’t get it because your mind is closed.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: My mind is clear!

Evan: Your mind is farcockt.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Farcockt you!

Evan: Alright, this is getting too heated. Let me try one or two last pieces of music. (puts on Find the Cost of Freedom by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young)

Hauptmann Rinderherz: A decent volkslied. Nothing more.

Evan: Alright. Try this one... (puts on Hooked on a Feeling by David Hasselhoff)

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Oh. Ja. Ja. Das so gut ist! Listen to that beat! Like geschlechtsverker!

Evan: Oy gevalt. I thought you might have this problem...

800 Words: Evan and Hauptmann Rinderherz Discuss the Berlin Philharmonic (part 2)

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Zo, who do you think are the world’s great conductors?

Evan: It depends on how you define greatness.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Nein, there is only one way can we define greatness. Nur performance.

Evan: That’s not true at all. Greatness is how much they give to music, rather than how much music gives them. When conductors collect thirty thousand dollars for a one-week engagement during which they perform a piece both the conductor and the orchestra barely need to rehearse before they perform to an audience which knows no more about the wonders of this piece of music by the end of the performance than they did at the beginning, that’s not greatness. I don’t care how effective or affecting the performance is, that’s cultural evil.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: OK. Ich habe nicht the energy fur this fight. What conductors you think give the best performance?

Evan: Well… Let’s see… The ones whom I think have totally mastered the art of performance?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ja. Who gives the best performance?

Evan: Of what composer?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Any.

Evan: You can’t do that.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Warum nicht?

Evan: Because lots of conductors give great performances of some composers and are terrible in others.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: That is not true! I find that many conductors who are good in one composer are good in them all.

Evan: That’s because you only like five composers.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Untrue! I like sixteen!

Evan: But some of them you don't love passionately, like Mendelssohn, Mahler, Handel, Gluck...basically the one's who aren't German enough to be loved.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ja! But I still like them!

Evan: The only composers I'm convinced you love are Bach, Weber, Wagner, Schumann, and Richard Strauss. And sometimes I even have my doubts about Schumann and Strauss. 

Evan: Alright, enough from me. So who’s consistent over a huge number of composers…well, I have to include Riccardo Chailly,…

Hauptmann Rinderherz (interrupting): Schrecklich!

Evan: Vladimir Jurowski,…

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Scheisse!

Evan: Gennadi Rozhdestvensky,...

Hauptmann Rinderherz: O weh!

Evan: maybe Manfred Honeck and Daniel Harding,…

Hauptmann Rinderherz: O Gott!

Evan: and perhaps Ivan Fischer and Paavo Jarvi,…

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach Gott!

Evan: and I suppose I could include Semyon Bychkov and Andris Nelsons and Kirill Petrenko and David Zinman and Herbert Blomstedt…

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Mein Gott!

Evan: Oh! Don’t forget Franz Welser-Most and especially Neeme Jarvi.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Um Gottes willen! You are an enemy of music!

Evan: I’m sorry you feel that way.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Und I’m sorry you feel this way. Warum do you?

Evan: Because I like my music fast and Russian.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: How do you sleep at night?

Evan: I don’t. I’m too wired from the fast Russian music.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Aber you listen to Schubert and Otis Redding late at night!

Evan: OK, you got me. I think these conductors make orchestras really responsive to what they feel the music wants, they inspire the orchestras they stand in front of to consistently give viscerally exciting performances, they never neglect any of the most crucial musical elements, they can be extremely expressive without compromising the music's formal elements, and most importantly, they don’t bore me. But except for Nelsons and maybe Jurowski, none of them are serious candidates for the Berlin Philharmonic.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Und you’re sure of that?

Evan: Riccardo Chailly is a star in Leipzig and he’ll be 65 when Rattle retires. Daniel Harding is a protégé of both Rattle and Abbado, and that will disqualify him even though he’s a completely different sort of conductor than either. Paavo Jarvi will be knee-deep in Frankfurt and Paris and god knows where else by the time Berlin opens up. Welser-Most will still be in Vienna and possibly in Cleveland too, and even so, half the world already thinks he’s a mediocre conductor. Ivan Fischer will be 67 and is already the director of the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchester. Bychkov will be 66, and he could be a stopgap, but in five years he may well be the director of any major orchestra who offers him. In 2018, Zinman will be 82 and Blomstedt will be 90. The others are just too small time.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What about Daniel Barenboim?

Evan: Daniel Barenboim is awesome when he realizes that he’s a Jewish kid from Argentina who loves to perform and not trying to be the most profound German musician who ever lived.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Zo you do not like even his Beethoven?

Evan: Oh no, I think a lot of his Beethoven’s wonderful. I just don’t like it when he performs every slow movements at half Beethoven’s speed. But I think his Liszt and Bruckner are magnificent and he almost makes me love Wagner.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But you think faster than the metronome like Harding and Jarvi is alright?

Evan: At least I’m not bored…

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Disgusting!

Evan: Whatever works for you…

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What about Riccardo Muti? He does the faster.

Evan: Another conductor who thinks seriousness is the same thing as intelligence. He’s a much, much better conductor during those few moments a decade when a major key score lightens him up and stops him from flopping his hair.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: And even Mariss Jansons you don't like?

Evan: I used to like Jansons a lot more when he was a younger man, but he’s been spoiled. Too much success made him kind of bland. He still has the same intensity, which I love, but it’s just intensity without any character.  But what are we talking about these guys for, they’ll all be over 75 by the time Rattle leaves. What about real candidates?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Barenboim is real.

Evan: If Barenboim becomes the next director, the Berlin Philharmonic will be a joke – no different then any other orchestra which throws its future away with a high prestige name who has no future with them.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But he should be the music director now!

Evan: I’m sorry to say that you’re probably right. They should have made him director after Karajan, but imagine appointing Herbert von Karajan as the director in 1984 if Karajan were the director of La Scala and the Philharmonic's crosstown rival. That's how dumb a Barenboim appointment would be. 

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Still better than Abbado…

Evan: Oh really?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Abbado stopped being great when he got to Berlin. He destroyed the Philharmoniker!

Evan: Actually, you’re probably right about the first part of that, but it’s not because Abbado destroyed the orchestra. The orchestra was a shadow of a great orchestra under Karajan, turning music into a luxury item while other orchestras did the important work of introducing new music and finding new ways to perform old music. If anything, Abbado improved things quite measurably. But Claudio Abbado was always a delegator, and he got increasingly bored as his career went along. There was some point when he stopped caring about rehearsal or conveying any serious wishes to his musicians, but at every point in his career, he was lucky enough to face the world’s greatest orchestral musicians and in recent years they've all loved the fact that he makes no real demands. Sometimes I wonder if he isn’t just the luckiest conductor to ever step onto the podium, yet sometimes he snaps back into focus and pull an amazing performance out of his pocket.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ja, then so you hate Haitink too?

Evan: I don’t hate Haitink, but I do often find him astonishingly dull. I don’t hate Abbado either. But I do think they’re both amazingly overrated in comparison to a number of contemporaries who are demonstrably better. Not just Blomstedt and Rozhdestvensky but others like Mackerras and Dohnanyi and Colin Davis, all three of of whom can be extremely dry but also can turn on the excitement far more often than either Haitink or Abbado.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What about a junger conductor like Vasily Petrenko?

Evan: A one-trick horse who doesn’t seem to conduct anything but Russian music, which he performs extraordinarily well in that virtuoso way which tells you he’d be not much good in anything else.  He’ll probably end up inheriting the St. Petersburg Philharmonic after Yuri Temirkanov collapses off the podium dead drunk after his third bottle of vodka.

Haputmann Rinderherz: Then what about Yannick Nezet-Seguin?

Evan: Oy. Leonard Bernstein sans le talent.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: How can you say that?

Evan: He’s like a kid up there with a permanent sugar rush, but that’s when he isn’t trying to do the super-profound us to sleep in Bruckner. But he has no sense of the long-range structure or how to keep an orchestra together. But he’ll have a great career as the new ‘great conductor’ in this part of America. He arrived at just the right time to be the knight on the white horse who ‘saves’ the Philadelphia Orchestra and he’ll probably have the same lucky timing when or if he becomes director of the Metropolitan Opera. But I don’t understand how he got there or how people think he’s a great conductor.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But you like the fast tempos!

Evan: I like fast tempos when they make musical sense and the conductor gets the musicians to play in them well!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Then you must hate der Gergiev.

Evan: Sometimes I love Valery Gergiev. When his orchestras catch up to him, his performances can be amazing. But they can also suck, and sometimes his performances are both in the same piece. Like Furtwangler.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I give up, you are ein musicalisches schweinegrippe! But how about der Dudamel? He too is fast.

Evan: Well in most ways he’s just like Gergiev. An amazing conductor at inspiring the orchestra and getting a rich sound, he’s also musically smarter than Gergiev and much more curious about music. But even if he stays this inspirational, he’s gonna be erratic as hell and he could still be just another Zubin Mehta and completely check out musically by the time he’s 40.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Zubin Mehta is better than people say.

Evan: I agree with you, but that’s a pretty low bar to clear. In any event, La Scala clearly wants Dudamel to replace Barenboim, and if he takes it, he will have as terrible a time managing that house as every other director they’ve ever had.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But then why should he not go to Berlin?

Evan: Because he will and should demand they play all sorts of music which they hated to play under Rattle. As a conductor, Dudamel’s like Gergiev, but as a music director he would be Rattle redux.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But he venerates our traditions!

Evan: Well good for you that you think you found someone who does!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: You’re hopeless.

Evan: I’m not hopeless. I just think the traditions you love are unbelievably stuffy and reactionary.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: You’re hopeless because you hate music!

Evan: I don’t hate music. I love it more than anything short of herring in wine sauce and a pastrami sandwich.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: These traditions are what made the music you love. If you do not honor them, the music will disappear along with it. And everything in kultur you love except herring and pastrami will be gone.  

Evan: The age in which these compositions were produced will soon be completely dead and gone. We currently live in the most revolutionary era since the dawn of Romanticism. And the true test of whether or not these works are true classics in the sense which Homer and Sophocles are is if they still demand to be heard when the tradition of how they’re meant to be heard is entirely broken and a new one begins with no knowledge of how it was once presented. Will people still want to hear Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven’s music if they can only be heard live in an arrangement for Rock Band; or a synthetic orchestra, because in 150 years, or perhaps much sooner, that may be the only way people can hear the music we love.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Such an age approaches too quickly for me.

Evan: Well, we may all live to see that day.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: For music to die before me is a death from which I want nothing.

Evan: So long as our minds stay open, music will never die.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What mind is there in this other music?

Evan: This is gonna take a while…

800 Words: Evan and Hauptmann Rinderherz discuss the Berlin Philharmonic (Part 1)

(Evan gets home around 8:30 in the evening Thursday night to find that Hauptmann Rinderherz is still in his underwear. Hauptmann Rinderherz is the 53-year-old, crew-cutted, 6’6, 350 lbs, German man who’s been crashing on Evan’s couch since September. They met one day at bar trivia in East Baltimore, and quickly came to learn that this was a kindred spirit with a seemingly bottomless knowledge of classical music, and who’d been evicted from his apartment a week earlier. In a moment he’d come to regret endlessly, Evan invited Hauptmann Rinderherz to crash on his couch for the night. Since then, Hauptmann Rinderherz has never so much as left the couch except to go to the bathroom. Evan would later find out from HaWestbrook that there was, in fact, no apartment, and he’d been moving from couch to couch until his host tires enough of him to call the police. On Evan’s coffeetable is Hauptmann Rinderherz’s 400-CD collection of Carlos Kleiber and Sergiu Celibidache bootlegs, which the good Herr Hauptmann has not bothered organizing or even listening to because they can all be found now on his youtube channel, the views of which he seems to check as often as possible.

From the little information Evan can coax out of him, Hauptmann Rinderherz would appear to have been a rising star in the East Berlin police who specialized in interrogations (only violent criminals, not political prisoners), but his career was tragically derailed by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because he refused under oath to falsely acknowledge that he was ever a member of the Stasi, he was not allowed to continue his police work. He then decided to pursue the music career he abandoned at the behest of his mother who told him daily that her fondest wish for her son was to die for Germany. Hauptmann Rinderherz was apparently a childhood musical prodigy, and even claims that as a teenager he studied piano at the Moscow Conservatory under Emil Gilels, but Evan has yet to see Hauptmann Rinderherz approach a piano or even hear him speak a word of Russian. For the first few years after the wall fell, Herr Hauptmann made his living operating a floor-buffer in the lobby of the Philharmonie. But when Simon Rattle was elected the next leader of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1999, Hauptmann Rinderherz was so disgusted that he elected to leave for America.

Hauptmann Rinderherz lived for the next few years as a loafer, jumping coal train to coal train for the next few years through all the various American cities until he happened to catch an episode of The Wire through the window of a Radio Shack in Toledo. He immediately realized that of all American cities, Baltimore alone had the gritty dinginess to remind him of the good old days of the Honecker dictatorship when everybody was banded together in the communal solidarity of mutual misery.)

Evan: Hello Herr Hauptmann! How was your day?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach. This latest post of yours is insufferably pompous - presenting your own personal opinions as though it’s a new theory. You never were much of an intellectual.

Evan: I’m not an intellectual. I just play one on the internet. And I never said it was anywhere near complete or anything more than attempt to gather my thoughts.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: We must work on your thought gathering ja? It is something you have very little ability for. 

Evan: Maybe I should have called it a self-interview.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ah! Now I understand you. Like Witold Gombrowicz?

Evan: …Why not….

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach, such a magnificent novelist, the Poles never had another. Have you ever read Ferdydurke?

Evan: I tried, I didn’t like it.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: You wouldn’t.

Evan: What does that mean?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: It’s the same reason you won’t read Hermann Broch. You are intimidated by the thought that intelligences are greater than yourselves.

Evan:  I’ve just come around to the point of view that if you’re insecure enough to have to show off what you know, you’re probably insecure about the fact that you don’t know that much. (pauses to contemplate the various ironies of that last sentence…)

Hauptmann Rinderherz: (mutters) Typical anti-intellectual Americanische…

Evan: Most Americans I know would probably disagree.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What do these idioten know? Spoiled and weak from comforts and thinking a year of unemployment is the world-end. In 1945 my mother lived on a single herring for a month!

Evan: She was dehoused by Allied bombing?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Nein. Just anorexic.

Evan: Ah. I’m sorry.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Bitte nicht, don’t apologize. She was my size and diabetic by the time I was five.

Evan: How do Northern Europeans always age so quickly?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: It’s in our blood. The new generation needs breathing room!

Evan: Are you at all aware of how you sound to other people?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Yes. But your demand for a sense of irony is an easily surmountable obstacle.

Evan: Y’know…I’m still trying to figure out if you’re charming or a genuinely offensive stereotype. And can I please use my own computer?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Here.

(Herr Hauptmann gives Evan the computer and picks up his copy of On Nature by Anaximander. Evan checks mail, looks at facebook, and checks his blog for pageviews. When he goes to twitter, he sees an extremely newsworthy development for classical music fans.)

Evan: Herr Hauptmann! Look at this! Apparently Simon Rattle is leaving the Berlin Philharmonic.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Mr. Tucker thank you very much for your hospitality. I shall leave right now.

Evan: Really?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Now that Simon Rattle is leaving the Philharmoniker, it is safe to go back to Berlin.

Evan: Well, far be it for me to stop you, but he's not leaving for another five years. And who knows, he might still change his mind and make peace with the orchestra.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Nevertheless, this is the greatest victory for Rattlehaters in our long, illustrious history. I must go join the cheering throngs who are dancing in the streets.

Evan: I highly doubt there are any cheering throngs to celebrate Simon Rattle's departure. And why do you hate Simon Rattle so much?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach! So viele grunde! He is the Barack Obama of music! A celebrity leichtgewichtler who put your hintere in the seat so he can feed you Scheissemusik! More rock singer than conductor!

Evan: What’s wrong with being a rock star? Wouldn’t it be great to have classical musicians who got the kind of publicity rock stars do?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: It is a pollution of music’s natural purity! The kultur industry now dictates how we must appreciate the classics! First they gave us a jazz conductor mit Leonard Bernstein, now we have this rock star Simon Rattle.

Evan: Was that any reason to leave Germany?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach nein! I came to America to meet der Johnny Cash!

Evan: So you actually like American popular music?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: He sang Der Ring!

Evan: Herr Hauptmann… I don’t think that the same Ring.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I know that! But he is the noble savage! The animal vox populi which must be kept in complete kulturkampf from Heilige Deutsche Kunst! I came to America to resist rock music. I came to America to look der Johnny Cash in the eye and tell him that he shall not triumph!

Evan: Why must the two cultures be kept separate? Don’t you think classical musicians might learn something from Johnny Cash? Who, by the way, has been dead for nearly ten years.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Nein! So long as art is polluted by his energy we shall never free ourselves from the shakles of animal man to achieve our true worldspiritpotential!

Evan: I think that’s a little unfair. There is plenty of animal energy in classical music. And even if what you’re saying may have a very small grain of truth, why blame Simon Rattle for it?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Because musicians like Rattle are the reason that all that is good in art shall never triumph. And his performances are terrible!

Evan: No they’re not!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: So you truly believe that Simon Rattle is the Maestro from all the Maestros?

Evan: He’s one of them, certainly. He has his problems as a conductor, but he’s no lightweight. He’s a fantastic musician who came to Berlin for all the best reasons. The musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic knew that if they wanted to maintain their reputation as the world’s greatest orchestra, they had to modernize themselves very quickly. But they didn’t let Rattle finish the job, so now they’ll be just another fine German orchestra which specializes in Brahms and Bruckner – no different than the Staatskapelles Dresden or Berlin, but not quite as good as either. 

Hauptmann Rinderherz: So honestly you think the Philharmoniker lost its position as the world’s greatest orchestra by chasing Rattle from the baton?

Evan: The Berlin Philharmonic probably never was the greatest orchestra in the world, and it especially wasn’t the greatest under Karajan.  At least the Vienna Philharmonic was probably the world’s greatest orchestra in the 1870’s and 80’s, and it’s lived in that era ever since. But the supremacy of the Berlin Philharmonic was always a myth.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I can’t believe what I’m hearing! Listen to how much better they sounded from the Karajan and Furtwangler years. Listen to the final years of Abbado!

Evan: Berlin never got Simon Rattle at his best because the more traditional members of the orchestra weren’t willing to give him their best. They resented the fact that he was their director at all, and that limited how willing they were to commit to his performances. And perhaps now that they know Rattle is leaving, they’ll perform better for him in the same way their performances for Abbado improved once they realized he was leaving too.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: They resented him because he wasn’t a conductor good enough!

Evan: Well it’s true that he’s not the greatest conductor in the world performance-wise. He has a kind of interpretive attention deficit disorder which makes him too reckless. Conductors like Bernstein and Barenboim have a level of genius that allows them make up their interpretations on the spot and still make musical sense, Rattle doesn’t but thinks he does. But even so, it’s amazing how many risks he gets away with, and I’ll take Rattle’s fearlessness over the kind of overprotective carefulness you get from most conductors any day of the week.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But if he’s not performance-wise the greatest conductor in the world, he’s not the greatest conductor in the world. Only performances matter.

Evan: The performance is just one part of a conductor’s responsibility. Rattle is a great conductor because he brings music to others who would never hear it otherwise. He made sure the Berlin Philharmonic musicians were all well-paid before he even signed his contract. He’s involved inner-city children in concerts, he brought in great multimedia artists for interdisciplinary performances, he established an education department for the Berlin Philharmonic, he is absolutely undogmatic in terms of the repertoire he performs, and he’s always rethinking his interpretations of what he performs. To me, that is indicative of the fact that he is one of the very greatest conductors who ever lived.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Well I just think he is lucky. A wunderkind who was not talented yet had every advantage other musicians never have.

Evan: Well it can’t be denied that luck certainly played its role in Rattle’s career. But Rattle should be measured by what he’s done with his luck. And very few musicians have used luck to do more good.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach. Do good, what does good and evil have to do with music?

Evan: What is the point of Beethoven’s message if people aren’t there to hear it?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: People will hear it!

Evan: How?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: By force!

Evan: What??

Hauptmann Rinderherz: If they do not hear the message of die neunte symphonie, they must be made to listen and appreciate its importance.

Evan: Is this what you really believe?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: 300%.

Evan: So… then I’m just going to take a guess that you would like to see Christian Thielemann replace Rattle.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ja ja. Er ist Der Meister. The greatest since Furtwangler!

Evan: High praise indeed. Though you do realize that he’s branching out now and making a real effort to conduct Russian and French music, right?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ja. But he doesn’t look like he likes it.

Evan: Well, you’re in luck, because Thielemann will probably be the next director. 

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Wirklich? I thought he would be too committed to his work in Dresden and Bayreuth.

Evan: Furtwangler and Nikisch both conducted the Berlin Philharmonic and the Leipzig Gewandhaus simultaneously. Karajan held jobs with the Vienna Opera, the Vienna Symphony, the Salzburg Festival, and L’Orchestre de Paris at the same time that he headed the Berlin Philharmonic. I don’t think it’s good for music, but conductors hold multiple jobs all the time and put in too few hours with every one of them.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Do not give me false hope! A Thielemann Philharmoniker would be a golden age for music!

Evan: Well, Thielemann is a very talented conductor, but he conducts a limited repertoire. And even in his specialties, he has many of the same problems as an interpreter that Simon Rattle has.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Do not you dare to compare der meister to that Beatlesschwindler!

Evan: Think about it. They both have amazing ears for orchestral color, they both relish the big tunes, and they can both go to ridiculous interpretive extremes.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: It is not ridiculous when Thielemann does it! He lives and suffers for his holy art!

Evan: Well, I think he goes to a lot of excesses that don’t come off particularly well. But if you don’t want a heart attack from too much excitement, why don’t we discuss some of the other alternatives. How do you feel about Daniele Gatti? When it wasn’t certain Rattle would extend his contract past 2012, the musicians conducted a poll for whom they wanted to be the next conductor and Gatti was the winner.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ein grosser Maestro. The greatest of the Italians except for Il Giulini.

Evan: Wow. No other Italians earn your approbation?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Toscanini was a kappellmeister, no imagination or gemutlichkeit. De Sabata has no innigkeit, Muti too much loves the Italian music, Chailly is an annihilator of all German, and Abbado used to be better before he went to Berlin.

Evan: But Gatti clearly loves Verdi.

Hauptmann RInderherz: Nobody’s perfect.

Evan: Well, I don’t much care for Gatti and I don’t see the big deal about him. Technically, his performances are often disasters, and that would be alright if he sounded like he inspires orchestras. But he doesn’t, and instead he just has a lot of interpretive quirks that his technique isn’t good enough to make the orchestras play.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But there is so much innigkeit in his performances!

Evan: I’m still not sure what this innigkeit thing is… but I’ll let it go. And in any event, he keeps getting invited back to the greatest orchestras, so clearly orchestral musicians see something in him I don’t.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ja ja. And certainly would he be preferable to Paavo Jarvi.

Evan: Really? I love Paavo Jarvi, I just wish he would stop trying to conduct 5 orchestras at a time.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Jarvi is terrible. Such awful Beethoven.

Evan: I love Jarvi’s Beethoven. Hell, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a performance by Jarvi which I didn’t think was great. But I don’t think you have to worry too much. He’s clearly beloved in Frankfurt and he’ll probably be the director of four more orchestras by the time the Berlin Philharmonic begins to consider who their next director might be.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Well if not Thielemann, the next director should be Andris Nelsons. Ein grosser Wagnerleiter.

Evan: Well I agree that he’d be a very good choice, maybe even the prudent one. He’ll be only 40 when Rattle leaves, he’s a very fine conductor of all sorts of music, including many composers you don’t like, and he always has interesting ideas. But if you expect another Furtwangler, you won’t get it in Nelsons.  

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Why not?

Evan: He’s far too catholic in his tastes to limit himself to German music. And his basic tempos are far, far quicker than Furtwangler’s. He’s more like Mengelberg than Furtwangler.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: To even have a Mengelberg today…

Evan: Well, you’re a Celibidache fan. What do you think of Semyon Bychkov?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: He’s no Celibidache! How can you make that comparison even?

Evan: They’re both uncompromising masters of the craft who hate the wear and tear of being a music director, they’ve whittled their repertoire down to the pieces they really love, they both started their careers at the top of the profession and then had periods of working in obscurity so they could get the results they wanted. 

De Sabata/Kodaly Addendum

Returning to it now, both Solti and De Sabata have to at least share pride of place with two utterly Hungarian readings. Firstly, Antal Dorati's beautifully nuanced recording with the Philharmonica Hungarica. While not as flashy or effect-driven, Dorati shapes the piece almost entirely without personalized intervention. But he does so knowing that he has an orchestra that obviously knows every detail of the piece and style backwards and forwards. If this reading were done by any combination that didn't possess complete mastery of the stylistic tricks, it would have fallen completely flat. Also, Ivan Fischer does not quite take De Sabata's interventionist hand, but he comes quite close at times. Fischer as always has the Budapest Festival Orchestra, which is even more understanding of Hungarian peasant styles than Furtwangler's Berliners (at least some of whom must have relished the chance to play some gypsy-influenced music under a half-Jewish conductor).


(Fischer with the descendants of those Berliners in a free Europe)

....that reminds me, it might be time to revise and expand Top 20 Conductors (perhaps expanded to a top 25 or 30) list. I'll have to revise to put De Sabata in the top 20, not to mention give higher consideration to deserving past conductors like Nikolai Golovanov, Eduard van Beinum, Karl Ancerl, Adrian Boult, Artur Rodzinski, Kyril Kondrashin, Igor Markevitch, Vaclav Talich, Eugene Ormandy, Felix Weingartner, and Bruno Walter (I'm particularly ashamed that I didn't at least give Walter an honorable mention). And I also have to recognize some present-day conductors I left off the list as well like Christoph Eschenbach, Christoph von Dohnanyi, David Zinman, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Ivan Fischer (or the 'maybes' from the present....like James Levine, Riccardo Chailly, Daniel Barenboim, Franz Welser-Most, Valery Gergiev, etc. and then there's the list of overrated....which since my tastes seem to be rather idiosyncratic should make lots of friends among interneters if I ever dared to post it or get them to read it....). Maybe I should just scrap the whole thing and start over...


...for anyone pathetic enough to be wondering...no it was not my intention to stay in listening obsessively to Kodaly on a perfectly serviceable Saturday night. IIIII was going to a Bavarian beer hall tonight, but I seem to be having my bi-monthly dizzy spells. Don't know why....but Kodaly is a half-way decent consolation....This not quite 30-year-old blogger is not so pathetic that he doesn't have Saturday night plans....but quite pathetic enough that he feels the need to justify this to cyberspace thank you.

De Sabata/Kodaly

The Dances of Galanta with De Sabata and the Berlin Philharmonic in 1939. It's bloody great. The only recording that competes with, and perhaps exceeds, Georg Solti's barn-burning London Philharmonic recording from the 50's. De Sabata was probably the most serious omission on my Top 20 Conductors list. If my head were on straighter he'd probably have been #6, right between Munch and Rattle. Expressive as his music-making is, he's a bit too highly strung and over-precise for my taste - he clearly drives the music in the name of expression, but the result can seem more ennervated than necessary. This is a problem shared by the Carlos Kleiber, Willem Mengelberg, Antal Dorati, and Ferenc Fricsay (extraordinary conductors all of them, to say nothing of contemporary ones like Muti, Gergiev, Pappano and Dudamel...). But when De Sabata produces results of such excitement and personality, what does a complaint like that matter unless you're comparing to the very best of the best?

Thielemann Doing Beethoven, I eat crow...

I hate to admit this....


(Christian Thielemann and the Vienna Philharmonic. Hugely exciting, enormous sound, dangerously fast, extreme tempo changes, more a philosophical speculation of what Beethoven 5 can sound like than a mathematical proof of what it does sound like.)

This is fantastic Beethoven from Christian Thielemann. No surprise, this is Beethoven defiantly of the Old School. But few conductors, if any, have ever successfully channeled the Furtwangler style like this. Judging by the Beethoven 9 symphonies you can currently find Thielemann and the Vienna Philharmonic do on youtube, this is absolutely fantastic in so many ways. Though I wouldn't quite put this in the very first rank of Beethoven recordings. Thielemann is a bit more in love with the old style of Beethoven playing than the music itself, but this is still absolutely wonderful in its way.


(A very different Beethoven 5 from Thielemann's mentor, Herbert von Karajan. Ultra-disciplined, uncomfortably martial, still more enormous sound, but extremely fiery. Thielemann is Beethoven through the ears of Hegel, Karajan is Beethoven through the ears of Napoleon.)

It's all the more painful to admit, because while back, I wrote about Christian Thielemann in rather apocalyptic terms. I don't regret what I said. Christian Thielemann really is bad news for classical music, an infusion of reverence for tradition during a period when more reverence is the last thing classical music needs. But part of the reason he's so dangerous is because his performances really can be as great as people say.


(Beautiful.)