I'll try to be careful not to make this another conductor post, but Kirill Petrenko performed Josef Suk again this week. I'm already reasonably confident that Petrenko's championing of Suk is going to go down into music history as one of the most consequential moments in orchestral performance history - as consequential as what Bernstein did for Mahler and Mackerras for Janacek. In each case, it's not like nobody knew the music beforehand, but these conductors took these figures who existed at the repertory fringes and brought them into the dead center.
Contra it's reputation, the Berlin Philharmonic is not the world's greatest orchestra, it is a near-perfect machine around which a slightly creepy cult forms that prefers mechanical awe to personal, human expression, but now that Petrenko is their director, they have their chance to be the orchestra their publicity machine always claimed they were.
Furtwangler was larger than life, a titan who gave performances of explosive vision we shall never hear again, but he had no understanding of the human side of life - his performances soar with ecstasy and explode apocalyptically, but laughter, tears, simple human pleasures, they are never to be found in his conception of music. Karajan displayed a perfect imitation of a musical mastery because he was a grotesque exaggeration of a conductor, a craftsman who excited without moving, lacking absolutely nothing in his musicianship except a soul. Furtwangler was not a Nazi in his core, just a bit of an upper-class twit with the leisure to believe in the priority of metaphysics while the real world crumbled, but listen Karajan's musicmaking. There is no way to hear that awesome harnessing of force and authority and not realize that this man was totalitarian to the marrow, because there is so clearly something evil sounding about the brute force of his music making. Abbado was precisely the opposite - so small-scale and low-key that the passion of Furtwangler was by the 1990s almost completely absent. When the music called for intimacy, Abbado was magnificent, but he expended herculean effort to avoid any semblance of grandiloquence. Rattle is perhaps the greatest conductor of music written after 1900 who ever lived, and yet amid so much 19th century tradition he sounded adrift, as though he had no idea what to do amid a palate of tradition he's spent his career trying to cleanse.
And then there is Petrenko, whom we still barely know, but at least at the moment seems simultaneously a perfect conducting machine like Karajan, an ecstatic like Furtwangler, and perhaps also a breathing human like Abbado. I will be the only person in the world who says this, but for the first time, a true master has stepped up to the Berlin Philharmonic podium, and we have no idea yet of the limitless potential when an infinite maestro steps in front of the most infinitely talented musicians in Europe whose potential has still never truly been harnessed.
What makes Petrenko so masterful is that he is 'one of us', ten years ago, just an underrated C-lister who would probably be lucky to get a semi-major radio orchestra appointment by his sixties because he clearly cared more about music than building a career. And now, for once, musical master gets a job worthy of him.
Anyway, that's so much more than enough of that, so what makes Josef Suk such a revelation?
If a a person with no musical sense told you dryly that a Czech composer like Suk was born twenty years after a Czech composer like Janacek, you'd rightly tell that person to shut up because they had no idea what they were talking about. And yet it's absolutely true. Suk was not a conservative, but he was a musical moderate educated impeccably by Dvorak, who became his father-in-law. He was formed by an era when Brahms and Tchaikovsky were still alive and Suk began his career writing in that manner.
Are the early works masterpieces? Well, yes and no. They're beautiful pieces of music by a brilliant young musician who so idolizes his teacher that he can't help but write his teacher's music. Sure, there's plenty of Suk in Fairy Tale and the Serenade for Strings, in some passages they even exceed the inspiration of similar pieces. The melodies in Suk's Serenade for Strings are even more fecund and prolific than in Dvorak's and Tchaikovsky's, but it is an obvious successor work to Dvorak's still gorgeous Serenade for Strings. You can hear Dvorak's fingerprints all over the Fairy Tale - the percolating nature effects, the aching woodwind melodies, the alternately gruff and swooning string writing, the overwhelming brass chorales. When somebody says that a piece of music sounds like Dvorak, virtually every classical music lover can picture a Dvorak piece in their head. After hearing such a piece, you still cannot picture a work by Suk.
The Suk of the large canvas, the Suk too few of us outside the Czech Republic know and love, came later after colossal personal tragedy - the death of both Dvorak and Suk's wife within a month of one another. Of course the music of later works are luxuriantly orchestrated but more importantly: it's introspective to a fault. Occasionally it has the bonhomie of Dvorak's Slavonic Dances, but that kind of over the top rollicking nearly disappears from later pieces as far more original ideas take Dvorak's place in Suk's creativity. Yes, there's no question, Suk is a romantic, not a modernist. He's a romantic of a temperament so yearning that it's perhaps left romanticism behind, it's expressionism.
When people ask whom Suk sounds like, most Suk lovers say the exact same thing. If you love Mahler, you'll love Suk. But at least in my opinion, Mahler and Suk are nothing alike. Mahler is himself, like Janacek and Dvorak only still moreso, an unrepeatable musical event. No other composer else has the diversity of expressive modes to ever be mistaken for him. Even the composers most influenced by him sound nothing like him. No, the composer closest in spirit to Suk is quite a bit more surprising.
One could almost say that Suk bears the same relationship to Dvorak as no less a figure than his exact contemporary, Arnold Schoenberg, does to Dvorak's closest musical friend, Johannes Brahms. Suk is the next logical step from Dvorak, but after Dvorak's death in 1904, Suk puts Dvorak's musical language through so drastic a musical refraction that one might almost call it Schoenbergian.
Not the Schoenberg, mind you, of the atonal and serial periods. Rather who wrote hyper-expressive chromaticism until 1909, and yet Suk carried the language of the young Schoenberg right up to the end of his compositional career around 1930. Like many great composers, if not quite the singularly highest level of musical genius, Suk spent his whole mature career mining the same basic musical language, and that musical language was a close cousin to the music of the young Schoenberg: the Schoenberg of the Gurrelieder and Verklärte Nacht and Pelleas und Melisande and the First Chamber Symphony, the Schoenberg of the period before he discovered atonality. Or of the Anton von Webern of Im Sommerwind and the Passacaglia. In other words, romanticism frozen in time at the moment of the absolute maximum expression music has ever been able to withstand before becoming so expressively fraught that it cannot be held together by traditional harmony, rhythm, and texture.
Josef Suk was a composer of the 1900s, not the century but the decade, a composer of the alternate twentieth century that never came of age because it grew organically out of the nineteenth. At the peak of Suk's creativity, he was still barely thirty years old and he properly belongs to a generation of composers ten years older than him like Strauss, Elgar, Sibelius, Mahler... Janacek was born in 1854, but he is truly a composer of the 1920s, and he belongs to a generation of musicians thirty or forty years younger than he: Bartok, Berg, Webern, Prokofiev, Hindemith - and if anything, Stravinsky and Schoenberg and Ives can be considered a generation older than Janacek! For forty years, Janacek was just another competent Czech composer, occasionally inspired, but much too rebellious for his creativity to come unleashed within the strictures of the nineteenth century. But after a whole generation of potential great artists lay strewn upon the battlefields of the Somme and Tannenberg and Verdun and all the multi-fielded offensives, the longevity of this composer as old as Brahms's First Piano Trio let him live until a much more rebellious era who lived through humanity's darkest chapters could accommodate his defiant spirit.
Life is what happens when you're making other plans, but had the past century proceeded as planned, the arts would have changed much more slowly. And just as classical music may never have been supplanted by what we therefore call more 'popular' genres, and classical music lovers, who would probably be much more numerous, would probably listen to Josef Suk rather than Janacek, Nikolai Medtner rather than Stravinsky, Zoltan Kodaly rather than Bartok... All of these supposedly second-rank composers wrote excellent music. Is it cosmic music of the type you get from titans like Beethoven and Wagner? Well, is Brahms's? Is Faure's? Is Dvorak's? Composers like Suk and Kodaly were trained in the much more bourgeois late 19th century, where the rules of what constituted great art were much much stricter. and by the standards of their predecessors, they weren't even conservative. Compare Medtner to real Russian conservatives of their generation like Rachmaninov or Glazunov - even if Medtner's innovations are dwarved by Scriabin's, Medtner is clearly much more daring; harmonically, melodically, coloristically... So is it with Suk.
By the standards of their predecessors, all these would-be-20th century masters did things their forebearers wouldn't dare. All they lacked was the desire to turn all the rules upside down. Perhaps they lacked that bold rebelliousness of spirit you get from Stravinsky and Janacek, but on the other hand, the love which so-called classical music engendered among the public never recovered from that radical break. Are we composers and music historians and journalists, the musical 'elite' so we fancy ourselves, so sure that Janacek and Stravinsky are objectively better than Suk and Medtner? Or have our values, our ideology, our contempt for the musically lazy, pulled the wool over our eyes? We had the love of millions, and little by little, we allowed the disconnect between composers and audience tastes to grow larger with every passing decade of the 20th century. We're now one-fifth through the twenty-first, and audiences of the new generations barely even remember we're here. Is it possible that perhaps we've waged an artistic war for a century that was never won because it was in the service of a bad cause?
By the standards of anybody today but certain octogenarians, even Stravinsky and Bartok are not particularly radical music, even Schoenberg seems relatively accessible next to Xenakis and Elliott Carter. That is not the point. The point is that by insisting upon by making an aesthetic religion out of modernity, probably at least as much in visual art as in music and nearly as much in literature, we gradually exiled an enormous segment of the audience for classical music, and the result is that the boldest musical spirits of this generation: our Bartok's and Stravinsky's, can, comparatively speaking, barely get a hearing. In the long run, this elevation of the revolutionary over the reformative did not even benefit the revolutionaries!
The story of Josef Suk is the story of the aesthetic moderate, who has no champion because he fits no neat agenda, and adjusted himself like a magpie to the various musical influences of his era. Is he fully the equal of Dvorak or Janacek? Well... no. Dvorak and Janacek were unrepeatable musical events, stars who burned at the brightest possible flame who reinvented themselves time after time to fit the requirements of their eras, their commissions, and their performers. But if Edward Elgar and Carl Nielsen, so particular to the ethos of their times and places, can be considered among the great composers of all time - and deservedly, so can Josef Suk. If the unique musical language of Nielsen can be understood beyond the boundaries of border and language, so can Josef Suk. And if musical conservatives like Brahms and Tchaikovsky and even Bach and can force us to reconsider what's conservative and what's progressive, so can Josef Suk. In nearly any other small nation, the quality of Suk's music would make him stand tall as their greatest composer. He had the good and bad luck of being born in a country and an era with so many great composers that you had to be careful not to step on them. He embodied his era's contradictions, a 19th century gentleman forced prematurely to confront the century of death. It spurred him prematurely into a new era, and caused him no end of nostalgia for the world to which he could not go back. Suk received a very dark glimpse of the future, so dark that by the 1930s he simply laid down his pen - exactly as Elgar and Sibelius did, who found the truths of this new era just too terrible to keep telling them....
This work, my favorite of Suk's, A Summer Tale, is one of the deepest works in the orchestral repertoire. Like Strauss's Alpensinfonie, it tells a day in the life of nature. In Suk's case, not only a day in the life of nature, both its peace and its violence, but also perhaps an entire life cycle, not in the sense of birth to death, but in life's emotional experience - ecstacy and agony, comedy and tragedy, wit and vulgarity. as meaningful as any Mahler symphony. Simply look at some of the movement titles and try to tell yourself that this is not a musician who did not tie deep experience of music to deep experience of life: "Voices of Life and Consolation", "In the Power of Phantoms", and ending with a movement simply called "Night".
And if nothing else, I defy anyone listen to the central movement, "Blind Musicians", with it's duet of English horns accompanied by harp, and not experience some of the most beautiful, evocative music ever written.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrZu52g406chttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrZu52g406c
No comments:
Post a Comment