Strauss, Bruckner and the Dying of the Light

I am currently wrapping up a two-week visit to the 2017 Salzburg Festival. Every performance I have attended has been of the very first class, but I heard a few days ago a concert which touched me deeply.

The concert was played by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, undoubtedly one of the most splendid orchestras in the world. The conductor was Herman Blomstedt, celebrating this year his ninetieth birthday. He conducted seated. He had in front of him a miniature score, but he did not open it throughout the concert. He used no baton. The concert was akin to an intimate conversation among people who really did have something to say about, relevantly, two masterworks of German symphonic music.

All of that would have sufficed to make for a profoundly moving experience. There was for me, however, a sensation that what this music was saying had, certainly as to the first of the two programmed pieces, a real relevance to the sorry state of current public life, at all levels of government, in Australia.

That first programmed piece was Metamorphosen: Studies for 23 Solo Strings, written by Richard Strauss in 1945. His frame of mind at the time is described in the excellent program notes:

The destruction of Germany’s great cities shook Strauss to the core. “I am in a mood of despair!” he wrote to a friend. “The Goethehaus, the world’s greatest sanctuary, destroyed! My beautiful Dresden-Weimar-Munich, all gone!” …

Whatever one thinks about the rights and wrongs of the Allied bombing campaign, for anyone who revered German high culture, as Strauss did, the sense of something of almost religious significance irretrievably lost would have been overwhelming. It is also important to stress that by this stage Strauss was in no doubt about where the blame really lay, writing in his diary of “12 years of the rule of bestiality, ignorance and illiteracy under the greatest criminals, who brought about the destruction of 2000 years of German civilization and through a criminal rabble of soldiers, razed irreplaceable buildings and monuments to art”.

Later and in the concluding words of this part of the program notes, the heading of which I have borrowed for this article, this: “one does not have to understand the quotation to understand the message: something glorious, rich, ecstatically inspiring, has been brought to nothing”.

Those of us who have been so fortunate as to live out our lives in Australia, and especially in post-war Australia, have not yet been brought quite to Strauss’s nadir, but we are certainly well on the way. The steady incremental growth of 2000 years of Judeo-Christian civilisation is being deliberately undermined at every turn, and without more than token resistance.

The undermining might not, or at least might not yet, be the work of “a criminal rabble of soldiers”, but it is plainly the work of a totalitarian rabble of academics, who have no excuse for not grasping the potentially terrible consequences of what they are hell bent on unleashing upon society; of power-hungry, overpaid, poisonously narcissistic journalists who do not even pretend to maintain a clear distinction between reporting facts for the public information, and putting forward merely subjective opinions as though they were infallible; of sullen, discontented “students” whose idea of rational discussion is to close down any free expression of any opinion they happen to dislike; and of what seems to be fast becoming an absolutely entrenched general demand for equality of outcomes rather than for equality of opportunity.

A friend recently told me that the following proposition is abroad on the campus of the university where she teaches: “To those used to privilege, equality always feels like oppression.” Assuming for the moment that that smart-alec throwaway line has general validity—and I have seen no evidence put forward to support the assumption—why would it not be equally valid to say, and to say upon the basis of what is currently going on in society, “To those avid for privilege, oppression can always be passed off as equality”?

And now comes a new imbecility: we are to have, not yet a burning of the books, but a ceremonial erasing of our Australian history. Have we learnt nothing from the destruction of which Strauss spoke so heart-rendingly? First cull the statues. Then cull the books and similar monuments to our civilisation? And then what? Cull those irritating people who refuse to see their country reduced to the level of, shall we say, Zimbabwe? Perhaps it is not yet quite time to borrow “bestiality” from Strauss, but “ignorance and illiteracy” we can certainly see, if only we care to look.

And in the midst of this sorry state of affairs where is the informed and courageous political leadership? At the Commonwealth level, a government that began its life in treachery and deceit is fair set to end it in farce. Its possible, indeed likely, replacement will drag this country into a new dark age of class warfare, constitutional instability, moral decay and spiritual bankruptcy. As to the state governments, they seem to be in roughly, and in some cases precisely, the same sorry state.

All of these thoughts and feelings swept over me as I read and listened, and they remain with me still.

And yet.

The second piece on the program was Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. Bruckner is, in my view, one of the greatest of the late Austro-German composers. He had a hard life, especially since he was a contemporary of Brahms, who was immensely successful. It was the Seventh Symphony that got Bruckner the recognition so long denied him.

The relevant part of the program notes is headed “Paradise Regained”. The notes say, among other things:

Yet somehow, in the midst of this, Bruckner found the strength to continue. His fervent Roman Catholic faith was a major support. But it was not simply the forms of religion that sustained him. In a moment of anguish, Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard cried out, “God in heaven, if there were not some inward strength in a man where all this could be forgotten, who could hold out?” In his darkest moments, Bruckner always seems to find his way back to that “inward strength”.

And that, I suggest, is exactly what we must do, we who will never go quietly while everything that we know to be good and true and honed by time is swept away by the forces of darkness.

Alaric and Attila cut a swathe through their times. Attila, indeed, is said to have boasted that the grass never grew again on a spot where the hooves of his horse had trodden. And where are they now, those seemingly invincible barbarians? To borrow from Kipling, “one with Nineveh and Tyre”.