Michael Tanner

There are many Symphonies No. 10 by Gustav Mahler, or none. The situation is rare, if not unique, in the history of music. Basic facts: Mahler finished the Ninth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde in the summer of 1910. At the same time he discovered that his wife Alma was having an affair with Gropius, and that he had an incurable heart complaint and hadn’t long to live. One might have thought that these last two completed works are as movingly valedictory as anything ever written, but Mahler’s view was more complicated than that, and he immediately set about writing a Tenth Symphony. Over and among the notes, he scrawled messages to Alma, God and even the Devil, anguished pleas and expressions of despair.

It is amazing what fine performances you can get beamed to your computer these days. Slightly less amazing is the packaging these events come in, when they do. ENO relayed free a concert of Mozart’s Requiem, but it was preceded by a snatch of Strictly, with a row of muscular young guys ripping off their shirts, before we entered the Coliseum for a heavily pregnant Danielle de Niese hyping the event we were about to see and hear. She is delightful, but I wish she hadn’t been compelled to tell us that, despite his hard life, Mozart was sending us a message of hope that everyone, however ignorant of classical music, can be moved by. It’s just not true.

In the 62 years since I first heard and saw Don Carlo, in the famous and long-lasting production by Visconti at the Royal Opera, my feelings about it have grown ever stronger, both in passionate attachment and in critique. Imperfect operas, like other imperfect phenomena, can be more interesting than perfect ones, because they’re more thought-provoking, more enticing. The libretto, very freely based on Schiller’s play, was by two Frenchmen, and Verdi, eager to make a bigger splash than he had so far in Paris, made too much of one. The first performance, in 1867, ran so late that the members who lived outside central Paris missed their last trains, which were at 12.35 a.m. (Royal Opera and ENO: please take note).

I am daunted. Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony is a work that I regard with love, awe and even anxiety. I always wonder whether I’ll be able to cope with such large and deep demands on me and, if I hear a performance or recording that doesn’t disappoint me, be able to articulate why I find it so powerful, one of the supreme masterpieces of Western music, the greatest of symphonies. With musical works that one has the strongest kinship with, there is, as everyone finds, an urgent need to locate the qualities that make it so penetrating an experience, combined with misery at the gap between how one responds and what one feels able to say.

No surprise: the greatest musical experience of my life was Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1962. I thought at the time that I would never again be so moved by a performance of anything. I have kept an open mind ever since, and still it takes me no time or effort to answer the question. Obviously I can’t discuss here why I regard Parsifal as a supreme work, but even if I thought that Wagner had written greater ones, or that some other master composer had — in fact, I do think there are several works by four composers that are as great as Parsifal, though at that altitude rankings and comparisons become absurd — what I experienced in Bayreuth that year was unique and unpredictable.

Igor Levit has rapidly achieved cult status, as he certainly deserves. He has already reached the stage where he can programme enormous and pretty obscure works, such as Ronald Stevenson’s Passacaglia. Clearly, Levit’s taste runs to large-scale works, but his recently released disc, Life, shows his command of shorter pieces too. His first concert in this run of three was Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a performance that commanded an instant hush and was greeted with almost unseemly cheering and stamping from the Wigmore audience. Levit began this masterpiece in a remarkably quiet way, almost casually, but with an amazing singing tone.

Total immersion weekends can prove tricky. The established masters don’t need them, while lesser-known figures often turn out to be relatively obscure for sound reasons. Nonetheless, there are plenty of composers whose works are too rarely performed, not so much through neglect as because of the awkwardness of their demands — huge orchestras and choruses, or unlikely combinations of forces. The Boulangers present in all respects a special case.

Garrick Ohlsson is one of the finest pianists of his generation. Why, then, was the Wigmore Hall not much more than half full for his recital last week? Brahms. Ohlsson is at present touring with four programmes, all Brahms’s solo piano music. He treated us mainly to solid chunks, though he ended with the enchanting and almost light-hearted Paganini Variations, fiendish for Ohlsson but enlivening for us. Actually, he played an encore by Chopin, the solitary Op. 45 Prelude, preceding it with a charming lecturette about how Brahmsian, avant la lettre, Chopin could be. Ohlsson was a student of the great Claudio Arrau, whose attitude to Brahms verged on the frosty.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of approach to performing Schubert’s Winterreise, though sometimes there’s doubt or dispute about which one a given performer has taken. According to Jonas Kaufmann, Hans Hotter, for me the greatest of all performers of the cycle, as of so much else, insisted that the performer should be a narrator, not the Wanderer himself. But Kaufmann rightly insisted that Hotter’s various recordings are dramatic, with Hotter enacting, not narrating the monodrama. So it’s not always easy to tell. There was no doubt, though, in Christian Gerhaher’s recent performance of the cycle at the Wigmore Hall, with his long-time accompanist Gerold Huber, that we were witnessing the journey and sufferings presented directly.

No one any longer denies the immense significance of Wagner’s musical-dramatic achievement, even if they find it repellent. But his reputation as a writer — of operatic texts, autobiographical and biographical memoirs, practical essays on how to conduct particular pieces, vast and less vast theoretical works, ranging from speculations on opera and climate to theologico-political musings — is not high. Nor should it be, except for the more ‘occasional’ pieces. He was in fact a major contributor to mauvaises lettres, and no kind of systematic thinker, however much he might have liked to be. His only prose that is consistently readable comes in his letters, some of them enormous, all of them full of life and colour.

‘Is there an end [to this opera] that is not trivial?’ asks the Countess in her final bars of Richard Strauss’s last opera Capriccio. Given the previous two and a half hours, the answer would seem to be a decided no. It is a frothy confection even by the standards of his later operas, the better parts reminiscent of the Prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos and some of Arabella. One thing to be said in its defence is that Strauss’s writing it in 1941–2 is no criticism of him or of the work. People make a fuss about that, but do they think he should have produced an heroic piece — something he had already done, unfortunately — or another work in favour of peace, like the disastrous Friedenstag of 1938?