Underrated Classical Musicians: 2/11/20

The first ever uncut recording of a complete symphony. 1913. If you can stand the sound, it's bloody great, even if it is just plain'ol' Beethoven's 5th. 

The conductor was the first ever superstar conductor, Arthur Nikisch. People don't realize that the role of the conductor is mostly a 20th century invention. Sure, conductors existed before, but they were not the stars among stars - and rightly so, they didn't play an instrument, and cities were so much less populated that a full and full-time orchestra who could play symphonic music was astonishingly rare, and wherever there were full-time orchestras, they generally played opera much more often than they played symphonic music. Until the age of recording, most music lovers only knew full symphonies by playing them on the piano in their own houses and imagining the orchestral instruments. 

But while Artur Nikisch is barely remembered now, supplanted in the imagination of classical music lovers by so many of the next generation of conductors whom he inspired, Nikisch was the longtime director of the Berlin Philharmonic, and thus the first true high priest of orchestral music. He played orchestral violin under the baton of Wagner, he knew Liszt, he talked to Brahms and Bruckner and Tchaikovsky and Dvorak about how to play their music, and Brahms even said after a performance of his second symphony, 'You've changed everything, but your way, not mine, is the way it must be performed from now on.' 

There will always be something creepy about the cult of the conductor, which reached its peak in the 1930s, right as other cults of personality were formed in the countries where orchestral music was most beloved. But in 1913, you could only record orchestral music by piling about 20-or-less musicians around an acoustical horn. The double bass was so faint as to be inaudible, and its part had to be played by the tuba. How great a musician must Nikisch have been that he can give a performance this fiery under these circumstances?

Musicmaking before recording seems to be so completely different from how contemporary classical musicians are trained, and the secrets of what made it so compelling have long since died out. Some of the tempos are so quick as to be nearly the same as Beethoven's metronome markings, thought by most for a hundred-eighty years to be unplayable. And yet the tempo changes all the time. The execution is dirty as hell, and yet it doesn't matter at all. This is classical music played as though it's folk-music, in a manner as though present at the creation, with inflections Beethoven himself may have expected the music to be played with. 

And yet, at the very moment all of it could be caught on record, at the very moment when orchestras popped up at an exponential rate, the secrets died out, and as much as half of what made this music so compelling was lost forever. It is only in the generation of Nikisch and the conductors immediately in his wake that we can hear the old music of the most standard repertoire played as though it was still new.