Lenny and Ludwig

With fifteen to twenty minutes of advertisements every hour on so-called free-to-air television, overnight celebrities created by unsavoury “reality television”, and endless game shows, it is increasingly difficult to recall a time when mainstream television was a cultural force. But in the middle of the last century it most certainly was—at least sometimes. Ken G. Hall’s decision at Channel Nine to show feature films uncut from the key Warner Brothers and Twentieth Century Fox packages educated a whole generation in thirties and forties cinema, especially when the other networks followed suit and we got to see full versions of the other great studio films from Paramount, MGM, Columbia and RKO. The ABC screened live productions of Shakespeare and opera, not to mention numerous concerts, as well as high-minded Australian drama. Even Channel Ten broadcast Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts—on Sunday afternoons!

It couldn’t last. Pusillanimous governments of all persuasions (reflecting American “best practice”) allowed less and less Australian content and worse still, more and more advertising with writers here and overseas compelled to be so concise and elliptical that plotlines for mainstream made-for-television series have become almost unintelligible, with characterisation, beyond well-tried stereotypes, non-existent. Cable and HBO in the USA, the BBC and sometimes our own ABC and SBS are still able to produce and broadcast innovative television for adults; but as for our Australian commercial stations, they really can’t be trusted with exciting works like Judge John Deed or even Dexter (where the episodes are at the forty-minute length required for commercial television) as all their grace notes and complexity will almost certainly be destroyed by the ad breaks.

I mention all this because increasingly DVD is becoming the preferred way of viewing television programs. This is certainly true of Deutsche Grammo-phon’s 2008 DVD release of Leonard Bernstein’s filmed Beethoven interpretations with the Vienna Philharmonic from the 1970s. All nine symphonies were originally broadcast on American television in 1982 with introductions by the Maestro. Then they disappeared. There was a brief laser disc release in the 1990s and the sound was used for CDs and that was it; until now. After nearly twenty-five years, the Deutsche Grammophon set is the first international release of these concerts. In addition, there is the String Quartet 131, performed with the entire string section of the Vienna Philharmonic together with the Missa Solemnis (with the Concertgebouw Orchestra) and the piano concertos played by Krystian Zimerman, all for about the price of one ticket to see the Vienna Philharmonic at the Sydney Opera House last year.

So how good are these legendary performances? And do they compare with seeing Bernstein live? Certainly the performances are extraordinary, and my ten-year-old Sony set’s Surround Sound does full justice to the original recordings which were, at director Humphrey Burton and Bernstein’s insistence, originally captured on the superior sound and visuals of 35-millimetre film. As for being at the original performances, many who saw Bernstein conduct regularly in New York and Vienna count those concerts as among the great artistic experiences of their lives.

I was fortunate enough to see both of Bernstein’s 1974 concerts in Australia when he conducted the New York Philharmonic in programs of Mahler, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky, and yes—they were two of my greatest nights in the Sydney Opera House concert hall. But this is all we now have of Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic of the 1970s; and even if one had seen the concerts oneself, these films would remain an invaluable enrichment of the original experience.

Humphrey Burton, Bernstein’s regular collaborator, devised a method of filming the concerts that combined coverage of the event with commentary on the music. Shots of violins, trumpets, double basses and the rest of the players were intercut with close-ups of Bernstein conducting so that at times the music seemed to be coming from inside the Maestro’s head. Indeed, this almost exactly reflects how Bernstein himself described the way a conductor “listens” to a musical composition when he first reads the score. These images were cut to the music (the same kind of rhythmic cutting Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly employed when they filmed Bernstein’s On the Town). As a passage is played by the violins or the flutes there is a cut from the Maestro to the instruments.

Burton doesn’t go as far as Herbert von Karajan, who, for whole movements, filmed himself in a studio conducting with his eyes shut, the players often out of focus and only the instruments clearly visible. Neither Burton nor Bernstein ever loses the sense of occasion as the conductor interacts with each member of the orchestra. The players aren’t ciphers in Burton’s films and the abstract images of instruments are always balanced by conventional shots of individual musicians.

Then there is Bernstein himself, always involved, invariably dramatic, conducting from “inside” the work as he choreographs every emotional nuance in the music for the orchestra and now for us. These films are not designed for those who expect the sound to wash over them. The images of players and instruments highlight every detail of the orchestration; they sharpen our appreciation of the composer’s achievement and the artistry of the musicians. Moreover, these films are indispensable for understanding the vital place Beethoven played in Bernstein’s development as a musician and educator.

A dialogue in his book The Joy of Music (1959) has these revealing passages from Bernstein:

“… why Beethoven? Are his rhythms more intriguing than the others? Did he introduce any new ones? Doesn’t he get stuck on a pattern for ages? … And the counterpoint is generally of the schoolboy variety. He spent his whole life trying to write a really good fugue. And the orchestration is at times downright bad, especially in the latter period when he was deaf. Unimportant trumpet parts sticking out of the orchestra like sore thumbs, horns bumbling along endlessly repeated notes, drowned out woodwinds, murderously cruel writing for the human voice … But all this is mere dust—nothing compared to the magic ingredient sought by them all: the inexplicable ability to know what the next note has to be. Beethoven had this gift in a degree that leaves them all panting in the rear guard. When he did it—as in the Funeral March of the Eroica—he produced an entity that always seemed to me to have been previously written in Heaven and then merely dictated to him. Not that the dictation was easily achieved. We know what agonies he paid listening to the divine orders. But the reward is great. There is a special place in the cosmos into which this movement fits, predetermined and perfect … Form is only an empty word, a shell, without this gift of inevitability a composer can write a string of perfectly molded sonata-allegro movements with every rule obeyed and still suffer from bad form. Beethoven broke all the rules, and turned out pieces of breathtaking rightness. Rightness—that’s the word! When you get the feeling that whatever note succeeds the last is the only note that can rightly happen at that instant, in that context, the chances are you’re listening to Beethoven. Melodies, fugues, rhythms—leave them to the Tchaikovskys and Hindemiths and Ravels. Our boy has the real goods, the stuff from Heaven, the power to make you feel at the finish: Something is right in the world. There is something that checks throughout, that follows its own law consistently: something we can trust, that will never let us down.”

Then a Lyric Poet character in the dialogue says quietly, “But that is almost a definition of God”, to which Bernstein replies, “I meant it to be.” Bernstein expands on this in an exchange with Maximilian Schell, included among the special features with a discussion of Beethoven’s use of “decoration” to create melody.

One of the great strengths of these interpretations is the detail, another the way Bernstein encourages the orchestra to use the subtlest of indications in the quiet passages. The climaxes are, of course, overwhelming—the Deutsche sound has rarely been better—and for me the internal logic of the symphonies has never been clearer. I found that the most spectacular achievements of the set were the Ninth Symphony and an extraordinary Missa Solemnis recorded in Amsterdam by the Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Chorus of Radio Hilversum with soloists Edda Moser, Hanna Schwarz, René Kollo and Kurt Moll. Bernstein’s interpretation of the Ninth is best known visually from the film of the famous Christmas Day performance celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall, when he led a combined orchestra made up of members of the London Symphony, the Staatskapelle Dresden, the Kirov Theatre, the London Symphony, the New York Philharmonic and the Orchestra de Paris with choruses from Berlin and Bavarian Radio plus the Children’s Choir of the Philharmonia Dresden.

The project could easily have been a disaster. Bernstein was frail and tired—he was to die ten months later—and even though he had a favourite soprano in fellow American June Anderson as one of the soloists, the other singers included German tenor Klaus Konig, Dutch bass Jan-Hendrik Rootering, and British mezzo Sarah Walker.

It was, of course, a triumph. Bernstein announced to the world press that he had just had a message from Beethoven giving permission to change “Freude” (joy) in the Schiller poem to “Freiheit” (freedom), and by sheer force of personality united these diverse forces to create some extraordinary music-making. He even managed one of his last “Lenny leaps”—jumping at least a foot above the podium for the climax. Not mentioned at the time but in many people’s minds, and rightly so, was that Bernstein himself was a very public Jew celebrating the re-unification of what everyone hoped would be a new Germany.

Nevertheless, the Maestro would have been the first to admit that this was music furthering a good cause, not “the thing itself”: that is to be found in the earlier 1978 performance of the Ninth on this new release. Here he had the chorus of the Vienna State Opera, regular collaborators Gwyneth Jones, Hanna Schwartz, René Kollo and Kurt Moll as soloists, and of course the Vienna Philharmonic—all in great form. Burton films the performance superbly, capturing tiny moments from the occasion such as the delight of the soloists as Bernstein signals his appreciation at the end as the audience’s “bravos” erupt around the hall. Above all, it is an interpretation that encompasses the subtlety and humour of the work, together with its moving affirmation of faith and brotherhood.

The visual record of the Missa Solemnis is less distinguished than both the films of the Ninth.

But somehow the way orchestra, soloists and conductor crowd the frame is appropriate for a performance of such sustained intensity. The Missa Solemnis is a work that even experienced musicians sometimes find hard to come to terms with. Here, it is interpreted with a power that transcends the forms of the Mass—a great shout of faith that is disturbing (especially to those only familiar with earlier settings of the Mass) and sublimely beautiful.

These are the heights, but there are other riches in this collection: excerpts from The Creatures of Prometheus featuring accomplished solos from stellar principals of the orchestra, a delightful interpretation of the Choral Fantasy featuring a young Homero Francesch, and two discs devoted to the piano concertos. These are an invaluable record of Bernstein’s last great collaboration with Krystian Zimerman. The third, fourth and fifth concertos were recorded in 1990. When Bernstein died later that year no one had the heart to hire another conductor to complete the cycle, so Zimerman conducted the first two concertos from the keyboard, the orchestra grouped around him in the style of chamber music. At the time it seemed that the Vienna Philharmonic was channelling Bernstein, and the performances and film became a final tribute to the Maestro.

This Deutsche set is perhaps the ideal way to discover and explore Beethoven and the interpretations of his work by one of the greatest musicians of the last century. Bernstein is even represented as an educator, with an excerpt from his Omnibus television series broadcast on American television in the mid-1950s as well as the original introductions to the symphonies.

But should viewing DVDs become a substitute for concert-going? If they did, Leonard Bernstein for one would be horrified. Unlike Herbert von Karajan, who worked to achieve perfection in the recording studio then tried to repeat those performances in the concert hall, Bernstein came to believe the best recordings were based on live performances. Even the famous Tristan and Isolde set with its long rests was based on specially staged concerts. Television viewers and buyers of his records were for him just members of his audience who, Bernstein hoped, would also come to his concerts. That is why when the conductor came to Australia he insisted on an extra free performance. Ideally DVDs such as these will enrich the experience of concert-going, but should standards for live performances fall or orchestras price themselves out of the range of ordinary people in a blind search for “names” then DVDs will indeed become a substitute. After all, here music lovers can now see and hear the greatest names of all.

Neil McDonald writes: In Ian Jones and my discussion of the Beersheba photograph in the April issue we mistakenly have the charge heading east-north-east. It should be west-north-west.