ENTARTETE MUSIK

Back to the Silver Age

2013-05-23T20:44:00.000+01:00

Outside Austria, the wonderful world of Viennese operetta is largely overlooked. We might occasionally see a new professional production of Die Fledermaus or Die lustige Witwe, but revivals of the other classics, not least from the Silver Age of Lehár and Kálmán, are scant. Luckily there are still singers who cherish those scores, the latest among being Piotr Beczala, whose first disc for Deutsche Grammophon is a lustily sung tribute to Richard Tauber, the tenor doyen of the genre.

Beczala gives us a grabbag of Tauber's film and stage hits. Many of the original performances can be seen on YouTube, cherished for their ease and artless artistry. Beczala provides a more full-throated presence here and, given the advances in orchestral playing, singing technique and sound since the 20s and 30s, this is a truly luscious disc.

Always disarming, Beczala brings a suitably rich ring and superb diction (in German and English) to Lehár, Stolz and Kálmán's ardent tunes. When he sings 'You are my heart's delight' (recorded in both languages) you can't help but feel it's directed to you. And with Anna Netrebko on hand for 'Lippen schweigen' and Tauber, no less, for a rendition of 'Du bist die Welt für mich' (taken from his 1934 recording), there would appear to be little room for complaint.

Occasionally, however, the performances are guilty of little too much Schlag. There's not always quite enough swing and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra stints on Wienerisch upbeat Luftpausen. Likewise Beczala could provide a dose more wit, rather than his impressive but tenacious forte. Certainly if you listen to Tauber in 'Wien, du Stadt meiner Träume' you'll hear conversational bounce and throwaway phrasing that really enlivens the song. But this recording, like Joseph Calleja's recent Mario Lanza disc, is a well-performed and heartfelt tribute, ably demonstrating just how rich this repertoire is. Click here to order a copy.

Henri Dutilleux (1916–2013) R.I.P.

2013-05-22T13:48:00.002+01:00

The French composer Henri Dutilleux has died aged 97 in Paris. Born in Angers in 1916, Dutilleux became one of the most prominent figures within contemporary French music. Shirking the nomenclature and orthodoxy of any particular school, his music embraced a wide range of ideas and influences, visual, literary and musical – not least those of his compatriots Baudelaire and Proust. An exquisite craftsman, with a strong eye on the calligraphic element of his music, Dutilleux recently found a keen advocate in soprano Barbara Hannigan, who lately recorded his song cycle Correspondances. Writing about his music, the Süddeutsche Zeitung said that: 'Each tone carries weight with it, lives in a world of mirrors and iridescent light, referring to the origins of the myth and playing mystically with the deceptive nature of memory.'

Corrupting the Incorruptible Dream

2013-05-22T10:14:00.004+01:00

I admit it. I went to see The Great Gatsby with a critique already in mind. So I was surprised to find the film did not entirely live down to my expectations. Yes, Baz Luhrmann is meretricious, grossly untouching and obsessed with his own product rather than the story he is telling. But beneath the metre-thick veneer of this new film there are strong performances and a well-written screenplay desperate to get out. If you can, for a moment, look beyond the glaring surface, you might perceive a green light glimmer of F. Scott Fitzgerald's tragedy desperate to get out.

Luhrmann is fanatical about gloss. This adaptation is no different, offering a riot of fishnets, moonshine and thumping dance tracks. He rips off Woody Allen's Manhattan with his firework-plus-Gershwin combo – ignoring that Rhapsody in Blue was written in 1924, two years after the action of Fitzgerald's book – while the party scenes have all taste worthy of the gay wedding in the appalling second Sex and the City film. Worse still is the CGI rendering of 1920s New York and its environs. The digitised panning shots and sepia montages render the characters and landscape artificial. It's claustrophobic and all desperately unreal.

Of course this could be a huge metaphor for the house-of-cards life of Jay Gatsby, who has invented his identity and built his reputation and finances on precarious alcoholic stock. Yet Luhrmann seems deaf and blind to such ironies. Nick Carroway's house, next door to Gatsby's mansion, is similarly primped and preened, a showcase of art nouveau masterpieces that his professed $80 a month simply could not buy. The sanatorium in which Nick finds himself narrating this tale is likewise picture-postcard perfect. Even the Valley of Ashes, the grubby industrial crossroads between Manhattan and Long Island, is so souped-up that it turns into an insensitive parody of down-at-heel Americana. 30 minutes in to Luhrmann's excessive essay on excess you wonder whether the screen will explode – and I had steered clear of the 3D version!

Ultimately all this gloss shows a woeful mistrust of the story Luhrmann has chosen to tell and the actors he has employed to tell it. Tobey Maguire proves a touching Nick, genuinely concerned about Gatsby, as he's drawn into the glories of West Egg. He's largely passive in the film, wowed and mystified in equal measure. This may step away from Fitzgerald's egotistical intention, but it allows Leonardo di Caprio's nuanced performance as Gatsby to shine.

Slightly weathered with the years, Di Caprio is able to show the chinks in Gatsby's armour. His confrontation with Tom Buchanan (a suitably dislikable Joel Edgerton) has true ferocity, though it clamours to register amidst Luhrmann's claustrophobic setting. As Daisy, the object of their affections, Carey Muligan balances joy and melancholy, vacillating between the two as she does the men in her life. Her indecision proves her most dangerous attribute, to which Gatsby is ultimately blind and blinded.

Even with Gatsby and Daisy's otherwise touching love scenes, however, Luhrmann smothers emotion with over-lavish scoring and detailing that would make Franco Zeffirelli blush. What Maguire, Di Caprio, Edgerton and Muligan register as genuine, Luhrmann synthesises to the point of plastic and, far from concealing Gatsby's incorruptible dream, he brandishes it in stultifying CGI, Jay-Z rapping, lifeless glory. Not once does Luhrmann critique his own approach, providing metacinematic clout to this brash imago. That proves the real tragedy here.

Wagner 200

2013-05-22T08:28:00.000+01:00

Has there ever been a composer who has demanded or achieved more? Expanding time, harmony and philosophy, changing the way in which music is performed, attempting (if debatably) to harness the symphonic to the dramatic, trying (more successfully though troublingly) to wed politics to the opera house and triggering love and loathing for his work in dizzyingly polarised terms. 'Only Jesus, Napoleon and Hitler have had more written about them', according to Manuel Brug in Die Welt, though Wagner encompasses elements of all three figures.

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig 200 years ago today. There is no way that I could encapsulate, on this anniversary, what he achieved, yet every day, as I attempt to pen blog posts, write programme notes or give the occasional talk, often on seemingly unrelated topics, Wagner is there, looming ever large. And, like other truly great cultural figures, he asks a lot of you. Nothing about Wagner can be cursory or successfully dumbed-down. He defies the full stop and is, ultimately, the junction at which the history and discussion of Western music meets.

Pappano's Tchaikovsky

2013-05-20T09:02:00.004+01:00

Antonio Pappano is a resolutely theatrical conductor. There's no denying that the hours spent in the orchestra pit have coloured the way he conducts in the concert hall. And it's a great thing, though he has to pick his repertoire carefully; Pappano is not for all markets. This week he and the LSO really found their niche, bringing fire to Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky and Lutosławski with performances demanding high virtuosity, which the LSO delivered without hesitation.

Thursday evening's account of Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto proved an auspicious opener. Christian Tetzlaff opened with a moderato that was both intimate and intense – matched in his whispered Bach encore. Yet he also had a caustic edge, providing snap and punctuation to Shostakovich's increasingly biting narrative. Occasionally Pappano's sweeping gestures fail to serve such microscopic precision, though they nonetheless elicit unbridled playing when it is required.

Without the catalyst of Tetzlaff, Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony sounded too generalised. Given the Classical hallmarks of the work – like Mahler and Shostakovich's Fifth Symphonies, Tchaikovsky harks back to Beethoven – Pappano created a permanently blowsy forte. There were superb solos from individual members of the LSO – the woodwind section is in particularly fine health – but they were too often buried in treacly strings. This constantly luscious state robbed the work of inherent tension and the breakthrough in the finale, akin to Brahms's First Symphony, felt underpowered.

The second programme – Lutosławski's Concerto for Orchestra and Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony – was more balanced. Pappano had something important to say about both scores and the LSO really raised its game. Surprisingly, given the showcasing potential of Lutosławski's 1954 orchestral work, Pappano and the players never overplayed (as they had on Thursday). Texture rather than dazzling colour was key here, though Pappano could unleash truly dazzling climaxes when he had too. As before, some of the phrasing lacked pinpoint precision, but Pappano achieved great clarity within Lutosławski's multifaceted score with simultaneous echoes, as my companion noted, of Britten, Bartók and Bernard Herrmann.

Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony is, potentially, a more bombastic work than the Fifth. But after Pappano's rather orotund performance of the Fifth, he proffered something much more subtle here. Yes there were deafening salvos – are the LSO trumpets becoming a little too American in style? – and the return of fatalistic fanfares were suitably resonant, but the first subject was bruised, whispered even. Throughout echoes of Swan Lake and Eugene Onegin were forefront in the mind as Pappano allowed a much fuller narrative to unfold.

The slow movement spoke of hesitation and questioning, with the bassoon and clarinet sensitively answering each other's phrasing. The Scherzo had wit, recalling the tartness of Thursday night's Shostakovich. But, when the finale finally burst through, Pappano and the orchestra responded with a no-holds-barred approach. Teetering on the dangerous, this rapid attack felt entirely justified within the context of such a sensitive reading and it provided a fitting conclusion to a largely thrilling pair of concerts.

Föhn Culture

2013-05-16T23:32:00.003+01:00

What always draws be back to Hebel is the completely coincidental fact that my grandfather, whose use of language was in many ways reminiscent of that of the Hausfreund, would every year buy a Kempter Calender, in which he would note, in his indelible pencil, the name days of his relatives and friends, the first frost, the first snowfall, the onset of the Föhn, thunderstorms, hailstorms and suchlike, and also, on the pages left blank for notes, the occasional recipe for Wermuth or for gentian schnapps.

This passage from A Place in the Country by W.G. Sebald, recently translated and published English, is a brilliant snapshot of the late great author's style. In it links the German poet Hebel with his infinitely more prosaic grandfather, while colouring each in turn: the former is rendered more approachable, the latter infinitely more mysterious. The collision of the human and the natural world, the relation of time past and time present and the sheer mystery of untranslatable German words imbues Sebald's writing with a timelessness few other writers can muster.

I was particularly struck by the line 'the onset of the Föhn' and was forced to turn to the notes. The British Isles is not an island of winds (or at least naming them). We have no Scirocco, no Mistral. So the idea of a warm moist Mediterranean wind which deposits rain on the southern slopes of the Alps but blesses the northern or leeward slopes with a dry weather-changing breeze – the root of Central Europe's balmy summers – is rather alien to us.

It was marvellous as the Föhn embarked on its ferocious struggle, full of life and exuberance, storming, laughing [...] Later my love of the Föhn deepened as I welcomed it for bringing the beauty of the sweet, superbly rich south.

So Hermann Hesse writes in Peter Camezind. The Föhn clearly brings with it a whole set of circumstances, ideas, pictures and music... and even an illness, the Föhnkrankheit. The apocryphal malady is given this colloquial moniker in the German-speaking Alpine regions to cover a range of symptoms, including heart and circulatory problems, headaches, restlessness, nervousness, insomnia and difficulty concentrating. Other traits include fatigue, nausea, irritability, restlessness, general discomfort, exhaustion, decreased energy, insomnia and depression, all observed in people when the Föhn starts to blow. Perhaps for that reason, then, Hesse also notes:

A native of the mountains can study philosophy and natural history, and even dispense with God altogether, but when he experiences the Föhn or hears an avalanche crash through the forest, his heart trembles and he thinks of God and death.

As with everything, prosaic or poetic, this mysterious wind, unknown to the British Isles, is clearly a blessing and a curse. And, like the mountains from which it blows, it renders us insignificant. Click here to order a copy of A Place in the Country.

A Fresh Shock

2013-05-14T11:02:00.004+01:00

Wozzeck is a relentlessly chilling opera. But in English National Opera's incisive new production, the piece shocks afresh. Carrie Cracknell makes an impressive operatic debut with her no-holds-barred look at the workings of the mind of Wozzeck, a squaddie back from the Middle East. Cracknell reveals a perspicacious political message that honours rather than overrides Berg's multifaceted score, which is delivered with equally grim vigour by the cast, Edward Gardner and the Orchestra of ENO.

Although first seen by Berg before the Great War, Büchner's tale of a broken common soldier became one of the greatest operas in the aftermath of that bloodbath. The political, social and emotional flux of the 1920s sadly echoes our own disenfranchised, finance-obsessed times. Carrie Cracknell's updating of the action to a barracks like Aldershot or Catterick questions whether the soldiers that are being sent to Afghanistan are really cared for on their return. Judging by the grim surroundings of Tom Scutt's ingenious multilevelled set and the events that unfold, the answer is a shaming no.

Comforts are few here, the Doctor is a drug-dealing psychopath, while a braying Captain struts shirtless around the pub, swinging a tinny. Andres is an amputee, while the Drum Major, a seemingly proud man, carries the coffin of one of his men only to abandon propriety entirely. Marie is helpless within the melée as she fervently clutches the earrings given to her by the Drum Major, the only glitter in a glum world.

Cracknell's concept may be outwardly naturalistic, but she and her team respond equally well to the expressionistic facets of Berg's score. The interludes are framed within a parallel psychological narrative in which figures from Helmand interrupt Wozzeck's actions. Seemingly drawing on the Jungian idea of a 'shadow' – drawn, as with many of her details, from the libretto – Cracknell ramps up the physical and psychological claustrophobia to breaking point.

At the heart of the tale is Leigh Melrose's superb performance in the title role. Beautifully sung, he nonetheless communicates the crippling dissociation of his character's mental personality, where logic and hallucination constantly switch places. The lyricism offered by Melrose is, however, in relatively short supply elsewhere; Gardner drives a particularly severe reading of the score. The orchestra responds with pinpoint accuracy and some truly staggering climaxes, though occasionally you crave a little more of the Mahlerian beauty latent within Berg's music. This is doubtless something of a matter of taste, of course, which may not have melded so brilliantly with the setting.

The rest of the cast is likewise wholly committed to Cracknell and Gardner's reading. Tom Randle delivers the Captain's rebarbative lines without parody and is consequently all the more chilling. James Morris makes a colossal impression as the Doctor, a sort of power-crazed Wotan gone bad. Again, there are more poetic renditions of Marie's music than that delivered by Sara Jakubiak, but throughout, the performances and production run in perfect tandem.

This is, quite simply, one of the best things ENO has done for years, confirming that John Berry should back innovative theatrical and operatic talent, rather than flirting with cinema. Thankfully he seems largely to have taken that advice when planning his 13/14 season, which, on paper, looks impressive. Even if a challenging opera like Wozzeck will not fill the coffers, as is needed, Carrie Cracknell's auspicious debut makes a truly persuasive case for her talents and the company as a whole. The production runs until 25 May.

Photos © Tristram Kenton/ENO

Rethinking Mental Health

2013-05-13T15:33:00.002+01:00

Today the British Psychological Society's division of clinical psychology (DCP) issued a statement about the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), in which the BPS has expressed concern that 'psychiatric diagnosis is often presented as an objective statement of fact, but is, in essence, a clinical judgment based on observation and interpretation of behaviour and self-report, and thus subject to variation and bias'. In short, calling a set of experiences 'bipolar disorder', to give one example, may indicate a set of parameters but is not subtle enough to cover the specific feelings and distress felt by the individual or indeed the treatment and medication required. Without scientific basis for diagnosis, the whole question of medication was called into doubt.

As if on cue, last night I finally caught up with David O. Russell's moving comedy Silver Linings Playbook, in which Bradley Cooper's character Pat is suffering what has been termed bipolar disorder. Although the healthcare and judicial system within the story is clearly intended to protect Pat and those around him, his experience and emotions defy their expectations and the medication he is prescribed (but refuses to take). Perhaps the greatest moment in his cure is when the psychiatrist abandons his role and joins Pat and his friends at a Philadelphia Eagles game. And, true to so many people's experiences, Pat's ability to help others breaks down the necessary barriers. Having being hemmed in by diagnosis and seeming help, Pat is finally able to express himself. Previously ostracised from his family and loved-ones, the stigma is thankfully rejected.

Less eloquent and certainly less affecting was John Humphrys on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning (at around 2 hours 49 minutes) as he interviewed Dr Lucy Johnstone, a consultant clinical psychologist, who is on the working party behind the BPS's statement. In a seeming bid to prove just how slapdash an interviewer he is becoming, Humphrys failed to grasp which words should be avoided in basic psychiatric terminology. Having questioned whether psychiatrists simply don't understand about schizophrenia in particular, Humphrys repeatedly referred to 'diseases' and 'disorders'. So while the BPS was destigmatising issues of mental health, chiefly positing that there was no scientific diagnosis for bipolar disorder or schizophrenia and that cases had to be interpreted individually, Humphrys preserved an oddly out-of-touch standpoint.

Today was immediately followed by a wonderfully reparative edition of Start the Week, led by Jonathan Freedland. His guests were Carrie Cracknell, whose production of Wozzeck I'll see at ENO this evening, the pianist Jonathan Biss, playing Schumann at Wigmore this week, the academic Tom Burns, whose new book Our Necessary Shadow: The Nature and Meaning of Psychiatry is out next month and the psychiatrist Richard Bentall. Moving beyond former terminology, invoking what they had gleaned through their work in the theatre, in the concert hall and in the treatment room, the panel impressed with their ability to discuss distressing cases with care and consideration.

Cracknell has viewed the case of Wozzeck through the prism of a squaddie returning from conflict. Yet however much she has investigated the cause of his pain and violence, Cracknell was unwilling to offer diagnosis. Likewise, having played Schumann's Gesänge der Frühe, Biss was hesitant either to patronise Schumann or to discard any claims that his mental health may have coloured the way he composed. The truth lies at the intersection of reality and unreality which, like the BPS's more open approach, eschews labels and opprobrium.

We should all welcome the move away from the previous catalogue of so-called 'disorders'. Certainly the attempt to lower the threshold of these issues could lead to increasing branding of those who need our care, returning us to a mental health system where anyone outside the 'norm' (another useless tag) is separated. You only need look at the Narrenturm in Vienna to see it leads to wrongful incarceration. Artistic engagement with mental health – this morning's Start the Week, the Wellcome Collection's Madness and Modernity exhibition, a subsequent collection of essays Journey's into Madness and the artistic events at the Freud Museum (including, dare I say it, my own) – helps break down the barriers between the afflicted and those who can cure them. We might then be able to provide the sympathy that Wozzeck so desperately craves in Berg's opera, for instance, breaking the cycle that his poor child is otherwise destined to continue.

Massenet's Lovestruck Eulogy

2013-05-12T11:48:00.000+01:00

I've just been reminded by the Royal Opera House Twitter feed that today is Massenet's birthday. Much as I love Manon and Werther, I think he's a little misrepresented by their ubiquity in today's repertoire. Much better (and considerably more fun) is his sexy 1905 comédie chantée Chérubin (which the ROH produced in 1994 and seen at the Royal Academy last year). I first got to know the work through an RCA recording with Federica von Stade in the title role.

For those of you who haven't guessed, Chérubin follows the antics of Count Almaviva's page after he's been kicked out of the bedroom window. At the end of Act One of Le nozze di Figaro, the Count dispatches Cherubino off to the army (mocked by Figaro in 'Non più andrai'), so Chérubin finds the eponymous cheeky chap as he's celebrating his military commission and his 17th birthday.

Providing a glorious trouser role (originated by Mary Garden, Debussy's first Mélisande), as well as the voluptuous L'Ensoleillad and Chérubin's eventual choice of Nina, the score is full of yearning melodies and shimmering gallic orchestrations. True the dialogue may be a little pat, but Rodney Milnes' claim that the work is 'short on melody and memorable set numbers' is pure tosh, as anyone listening to Nina's lovestruck eulogy in the first act can testify. Little wonder Leighton Lucas and Hilda Gaunt pillaged it for the ballet score for Kenneth MacMillan's ballet Manon.

Where is Peter Grimes set?

2013-05-12T09:25:00.000+01:00

The forthcoming Aldeburgh Festival features an on-beach performance of Peter Grimes, which 'places the audience directly in its setting'. It's a great (if pricey) idea, bringing Britten out of the opera house and back to the locale that inspired the composer. In effect it was George Crabbe's vision of Suffolk that brought Britten back to Britain in 1942. But there's a bit of confusion about where Grimes is actually set and the festival marketing materials are glossing over a few details.

Anyone who knows Peter Grimes well will remember that, at the height of the storm, Ned Keene comments that 'the cliff is down up by Grimes's hut?'. Just before the Apprentice's death, Grimes reminds us where his home is:

For here's the way we go to sea
Down the cliff to find that shoal
That’s boiling in the sea.
Careful, or you’ll break your neck
Down the cliff-side to the deck.

There are no cliffs in Aldeburgh and George Crabbe makes no mention of them in The Borough. The only thing that 'makes almost a precipice' is further up the coast at Dunwich, where there has been a history of landslides; the great port collapsed into the sea in the middle ages (referenced in Sebald's The Rings of Saturn). Dunwich is about eight or nine miles north of Aldeburgh, which would have been quite a trek for the manhunt led by Hobson, but would make sense of Grimes's exhausted delirium. And there are of course cliffs in Lowestoft, where Britten was born (adding self-reference to the tale).

But, in contradiction to the Dunwich and Lowestoft theories, there is a Moot Hall in Peter Grimes as there is in Aldeburgh. And there are certainly enough pubs in Aldeburgh where Auntie could have been landlady (though the clientele now is distinctly more highborn than the Nieces, Bob Boles and Ned). Ultimately, what I think Montagu Slater and Britten tried to create was a town and a locale that was representative not only of Crabbe's chosen landscape but of a generic Britain. Our need to place Peter Grimes in a specific locale is indicative of a want to distance ourselves from its tale. But ostracisation and scapegoating happens everywhere, regardless of cliffs, Moot Halls or Auntie's pub. Click here for more information about the performances.

Gatsby: The Music Video

2013-05-11T08:54:00.000+01:00

Gatsby's excess - his house, his clothes, his celebrity guests-is designed to win over his beloved Daisy. Luhrmann's vulgarity is designed to win over the young audience, and it suggests that he's less a filmmaker than a music-video director with endless resources and a stunning absence of taste.

Thus spake David Denby in The New Yorker about the new adaptation of The Great Gatsby. But then, I sort of told you so when the trailer for Baz Luhrmann's latest offering appeared nearly a year ago. Perhaps, as I mused then, the film is one great meta-cinematic trap, a sort of style over substance critique of the vast gulf between the rich and poor. Maybe the otherwise bewildering inclusion of JAY Z, Beyoncé and Florence + the Machine on the much-touted soundtrack is part and parcel of his aiming for relevance. And perhaps too the box office will fall short of the estimated $104.5 million budget, thus achieving the perfect boom and bust Gesamtkunstwerk.

But that's probably giving him the benefit of the deeply-pseudo-intellectual doubt. Since Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet – both of which had admirable doses of irony – has Luhrmann produced anything of note? Moulin Rouge, which I enjoyed in the cinema, is frankly unwatchable (to say nothing of Kidman and McGregor's 'singing'). And we better glance over the travesty of Australia.

Andy Morris sagely observes that the current critical mauling conforms to trend. The novel was similarly derided, as was the 1974 film with dreamboat Robert Redford. Yet I can't help feel that David Edelstein absolutely nails the problem of Luhrmann as opposed to Fitzgerald when he says that 'his idea of cinema is rooted in instant gratification (you want it, you got it!)'. It's the law of diminishing returns and, honestly, the coffers look empty. You can judge for yourself on Thursday when the 3D extravaganza, complete with product placement from Brooks Brothers, Fogal, Tiffany, MAC, Moët et Chandon and The Plaza, opens in cinemas.

The Fundraising Cure

2013-05-07T08:42:00.004+01:00

It is arguably the most famous piece of furniture in the world. And it needs our help. Yesterday, on Freud's 157th birthday, the Freud Museum, based at the psychoanalyst's final home in Madresfield Gardens NW3, launched an appeal to restore the famous couch. Although it is covered with cushions and persian rugs, as it was in Freud's time, the couch – a rather simple Biedermeier affair – needs attention.

If any piece of furniture is imbued with the metaphorical and literal patina of its history, then it is Freud's chaise. Even in reproduction it holds extraordinary power. In 2011, the Neue Galerie in New York made a mock-up for its Vienna 1900: Style and Identity exhibition. Just before I gave a talk about the composers of the fin-de-siècle age at the Upper East Side gallery, I was invited to walk round the exhibition, to lie on the couch. Having just got off the plane, lacking a little blood sugar, I soon slipped into a semi-hypnotic doze. Waking up on Freud's couch, surrounded by Max Oppenheimer and Richard Gerstl portraits, was a particularly singular moment in my life.

Even though Freud arguably proved less of a doctor than he was a writer and a philosopher, his strength in the latter camp still endures. On the Today programme this morning, Giles Fraser drew a comparison between Freud and Augustinian Christianity in his 'Thought for the Day', which is well worth catching on the iPlayer. And, on Thursday at the Museum, I'll be looking at the impact of Freud and his colleague Josef Breuer's findings on the operatic world at the beginning of the 20th century.

Freudian interpretation of culture and history is just as strong as the psychoanalytic method he tendered. As Dawn Kemp, the acting director of the Museum, said in an interview with The Guardian: 'The cultural legacy of Freud's work is impossible to overstate: his method and his ideas about human 'being', imagination and creativity have shaped the modern world.' The least we can do, then, is support the fabric on which these extraordinary ideas emerged. Click here for further information.

Tenacious Goodbyes

2013-05-05T12:30:00.000+01:00

With its long sweeping farewell, Das Lied von der Erde has often been considered an elegiac work. But in Marc Albrecht's engaging new recording with the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, Alice Coote and Burkhard Fritz, something more tenacious is at play. Not all will embrace this more hard-edged approach, though it yields its own esoteric bounties and the playing and singing is superb throughout.

The opening 'Trinklied' is delivered with an aggressive swing. Burkhard Fritz's performance is not of an addled drunk but an angry one, railing against the world and the darkness of both life and death. Clipped orchestral textures and superb brass playing make for an engaging opener.

Alice Coote's plangent 'Der Einsame im Herbst' offers a stark but swooning contrast. Here the yearning and melancholic Mahler comes to the fore, telling the hangover triggered by the excesses of the first song. Albrecht draws a seamless legato from his players, before spinning Mendelssohnian whimsy in the third song. 'Von der Schönheit' begins somewhat unpromisingly, with a tempo bordering on the slovenly. But a thrilling percussive eruption emerges and then, as ever, slowly ebbs away.

After a swaggering return of Fritz's inebriated narrator in the fifth song, Albrecht and Coote unleash an embittered 'Der Abschied'. The C minor funeral march is particularly intense, to which Coote can only respond with a lyrical but painful goodbye. But it is only in the very final section of the poems adapted by Mahler that anger finally abates, the tension fades and things take on a softer hew. Those looking for sepia tones and fond farewells may not respond so well to this approach, but the open-minded will find much to challenge any preconceptions about one of Mahler's most intriguing works. Click here to order a copy.

On your bike, Mahler

2013-05-03T18:46:00.001+01:00

Mahler loved to ride his bicycle. He was particularly obsessed with the travelling by 'velocipede' in the 1890s while he was resident in Hamburg, as detailed in his correspondence with the critic Wilhelm Zinne. 'When will velocipede lessons commence?' he wrote to Zinne on 23 April 1895. Thereafter a series of postcards details Mahler's excitement at the new fad. Zinne taught him how to ride – no doubt while they discussed the shared interest in Bruckner. Mahler, as ever, wasn't particularly patient, though he clearly relished being on his newly assembled bicycle.

I'm admired by all and sundry on my bike! I really do seem to be a born cyclist and shall certainly be appointed Geheimrad [Geheimrat means privy councillor, so Mahler is on 'rad' (bicycle) rather than 'rat'] once more. I'm at the stage when all horses get out of my way – it's only with bell-ringing that I have trouble.

With all the doom, boom and gloom of the accepted picture of Mahler, it's rather refreshing to think of the composer madly dashing down the lanes in Hamburg, throwing livestock and pedestrians to the curb. The notes from Mahler to Zinne can be found in Herta Blaukopf's volume of Mahler's Unknown Letters, which Richard Stokes translated brilliantly into English. The book is now sadly out of print, but you can pick up a copy second hand online.

Picture of Mahler jumping on his bike to meet Walther Gropius in Mahler auf der Couch.

A Painful Pun

2013-05-03T18:17:00.002+01:00

It's always been a little confusing dealing with Wilhelm Müller, the poet of Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise. You never know whether the Müller you're referring to is the poet or the character in the poems. While teaching Schubert's settings of the texts at City Lit these past few weeks, I've begun to wonder whether Müller deliberately put his name right at the core of Die schöne Müllerin.

The text was written for a domestic Liederspiel, a kind of charade-like performance, which would have taken place at the house of Friedrich August von Stägemann. Müller was in love with Stägemann's daughter Luise, though his friend Clemens Brentano, the editor of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, got there first. Müller's diary attests to biographical inspiration of the poems and there are certainly a number of competitors for the young mill girl's affections.

Given the idealisation of the young girl in Schubert's song cycle, we can surmise that it is Luise in rustic disguise. But could the title Die schöne Müllerin not just mean 'The Fair Maid of the Mill' but actually a hoped-for 'Fair Mrs Miller' who was never to be? However painful that pun was in 1815, the issue faded a few years later. Luise turned Brentano down and Müller found his mate in a girl called Adelheid (with whom he is pictured here). But his unrequited affections for Luise are forever preserved in the poems and the title of Schubert's masterpiece.

Image from the Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz Berlin

Dancing and Leaping

2013-05-01T07:11:00.001+01:00

May is the month for lovers; a month ‘when merry lads are playing’, as Orazio Vecchi’s text for Thomas Morley’s madrigal puts it. Since time immemorial, May has held a certain fascination for the poetic and pagan mind, completed by the crowning of the May Queen (perhaps a parallel with the coronation of Mary within the Christian church).

But it has more distant roots in the ancient world. Always associated with new beginnings, May was dedicated to Artemis, the goddess of fecundity in the Greek world, while in Roman culture May was devoted to Flora, the goddess of flowers. In the Ancient University of Oxford, the Choir of Magdalen College climbs the tower and greets the rising sun on the first day of the month (as depicted here by William Holman Hunt).

After a particularly long winter, perhaps May Morning 2013 heralds more. With the daffodils still out in certain areas and the bluebells, wild garlic and asparagus only just appearing, summer has proved slow to emerge. But such a cycle of seasons is key to the narrative of Janáček’s 1924 opera The Cunning Little Vixen. The aged Forester, previously rather jaded by life, sees the glory of May stretching out in front of him. He rises up from his sleep and declares these magical and conclusive words:

A přece su rád, když k víčerom slunéčko zablýskne… Jak je les divukrásný! Až rusalky přijdou zase domů, do svých lesních sídel, přiběhnou v košilkách, až zase přijde k nim květen a láska! Vítat se budou, slzet pohnutím nad shledáním. Zas rozdělí štěstí sladkou rosou do tisíců květů, petrklíčů, lech a sasanek a lidé budou chodit s hlavami sklopenými a budou chápat, že šlo vůkol nich nadpozemské blaho.

In Yveta Synek Graff and Robert T. Jones's wonderfully poetic translation, as sung on Simon Rattle's 1990 recording of the opera, the Forester's declaration becomes.

When evening arrives, I welcome the rays of the setting sun! Spring comes once again and woodland spirits now return in May-time. Dancing and leaping and laughing and eagerly waiting for love! Holding each other, always answering spring’s hymn of love! And flowers will drinks the tears of May-time, rejoicing with roses, violets and yellow daffodils! People will pass in holy silence bowing their heads, and all the joy of Heaven will unfold, covering them in glory!

The Alexandrian Envoy

2013-04-29T14:12:00.002+01:00

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of C.P. Cavafy and the 80th anniversary of his death. Sage, calm but imbued with an untameable melancholy, his poems constantly dip beneath the surface of time, bring back the Romans and the Greeks from a Mediterranean past and fractures of more recent histories.

Cavafy was born in Alexandria, but he spent much of his childhood in England. His family had an import-export business which, following the death of Cavafy's father, failed and the family returned to Alexandria and then to Constantinople. Cavafy was 22 when he came back to the Egyptian port of his birth and he remained there for the rest of his life, a polyglot in a polyglot's town.

Alexandria's sheer multiplicity – a sea gate to the Levant, an outpost of Europe – that permeates Cavafy's poetry, written alongside his deeply prosaic work at the Irrigation Service of the Ministry of Public Works. Cast in a permanent state of memory, Cavafy's poems recall a global and a private past that are inextricably intertwined, offering a much more perfumed account than his bureaucratic job would have us believe.

Such boundaries, between past and present, private and public and prose and poetry, are the hallmarks of Cavafy's work. They are equally the fascinations of André Aciman, who shares Cavafy's birthplace and who is equally drawn back to that point of origin.

I had hoped finally to let go of this city, knowing all the while that the longing would start again soon enough, that one never washes anything away, and that this marooned and spectral city, which is no longer home for me [...] would eventually find newer, ever more beguiling ways to remind me that here is where my mind always turns.

Yet however specific the pulse and impulse of Alexandria are to Aciman and Cavafy, their observations are universal, regardless of origins, natures and hopes. Ultimately what once appeared to be ours will never be ours again – such as in Aciman's novels – and all we can do is grasp aimlessly at the details.

Θάθελα αυτήν την μνήμη να την πω...
Μα έτσι εσβύσθη πια... σαν τίποτε δεν απομένει —
γιατί μακρυά, στα πρώτα εφηβικά μου χρόνια κείται.

Δέρμα σαν καμωμένο από ιασεμί...
Εκείνη του Aυγούστου — Aύγουστος ήταν; — η βραδυά...
Μόλις θυμούμαι πια τα μάτια· ήσαν, θαρρώ, μαβιά...
A ναι, μαβιά· ένα σαπφείρινο μαβί.

[I'd like to talk about that memory...
But by now it's long died out... as if there's nothing left:
because it lies far off, in the years of my first youth.

Skin, as if it had been made of jasmine...
That August – was it August? – evening...
I can just recall the eyes: they were, I daresay, blue...
Ah yes, blue: a deep blue, sapphirine.]

While there he grasps for the memory of a love affair, homosexual in Cavafy's case, in other poetry he reaches out to forgotten empires and centuries.

Anniversaries are strange beasts. In Cavafy's case they bring a focus onto his poetry that he would have found deeply surprising, given his slow process of writing and revision and generally self-effacing approach. Yet, as Daniel Mendelsohn wrote in the introduction to his 2009 translation of Cavafy's poems (and from which the above translation of 'Far Off' is taken):

There is once more occasion to 'think' about the themes – the unexpected faltering of overconfident empires; the uneasy margins where West and East meet, sometimes productively but often not; how easy it is, for polities as well as for people, to 'lose one's capital' – which once again turn out to be not 'historical' but, if anything, very contemporary indeed; themes that the 'very wise, very civilised man' kept returning to, knowing full well, as historians do, that the backward glance can, in the end, be a glimpse into the future.

You can follow Daniel Mendelsohn's Cavafy-themed tweets by clicking here and using the #Cavafy hashtag or you can order a copy of his translation of the poems (now available in the UK).

Partying with Korngold

2013-04-24T22:08:00.001+01:00

This incredible document of Korngold in Hollywood has just been posted on the Forbidden Music Facebook page. Do go and check out some of the recent postings associated with Michael Haas's new book – now out from Yale University Press. You can have a look at Schoenberg's obituary of Mahler and the father of serialism's condolences to Korngold on the death of his critic father Julius.

Michael Haas will be joining me at the Freud Museum on 9 May. I'll be talking about opera in Freud's Vienna, particularly looking at the pathological splitting of the characters' consciousness in works such as Der ferne Klang, Die Gezeichneten and Die tote Stadt. Michael will then introduce his new book and talk about what happened to the figures that wrote the repertoire that sounded in Freud's Vienna.

Anyway, here is Korngold playing 'Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen' from Die tote Stadt as a kind of rhapsodic cocktail-hour waltz, before he segues into a few of his irrepressible Hollywood hits.

Joy and Sorrow Mingle

2013-04-23T23:22:00.002+01:00

You can't help feeling that Friedrich Wieck was a pretty unpleasant piece of work. True, his refusal to let Schumann marry his daughter Clara may have come from a kind place in terms of protecting his offspring, yet the effect on Schumann was increasingly detrimental, no doubt exacerbating underlying mental issues.

Over the past week I've been looking at Schumann's output during the late 1830s and early 1840s. I'm writing programme notes for the completion of Jonathan Biss's 'Under the Influence' series at Wigmore Hall, with concerts on 14 May (with the Elias Quartet) and 22 May.

Every time I write about Schumann I feel I'm dealing with something very precious. True, he can defy the dislocations of mental personality that dogged his life, such as in the almost untrammelled bravura of his Piano Quartet and Piano Quintet. But then there are the piano works written in the late 1830s, when Wieck was at his worst.

Schumann did everything he could to please his future father-in-law. They worked together and had much in common, yet every time Schumann felt he had attained some sense of clarity – such as when he was writing the Davisbündlertänze – Wieck felled him, denying him access to Clara and shutting the door on the hope for which his music so manifestly yearns. Nothing communicates the bitterness and disappointment that comes in pleasure's train for Schumann better than the text he placed at the top of those 1837 dances.

In all und jeder Zeit
Verknüpft sich Lust und Leid:
Bleibt fromm in Lust und seid
Dem Leid mit Mut bereit.

[In each and every age
Joy and sorrow mingle:
Remain pious in joy and be
Ready to face sorrow with courage.]

Click here for more information about Jonathan Biss's Schumann series.

Learning to love Respighi

2013-04-21T00:16:00.000+01:00

Recently, while in Cyprus, I was thinking about Rome. It was the smell of orange blossom, which is everywhere on the island this time of year, given the early harvest. The smell, à la Aciman, triggered a 'shadow city' moment, taking me back to a hot afternoon on the Aventine Hill, quiet, away from the noise and mess of the Roman streets. It was there, in the Orangerie, that I once fell asleep.

Driving through the plantations outside Lemesos – everywhere in Cyprus has reassumed their original Greek monikers – I tried to recapture that afternoon, waking drowsy and drunk. Music helps. It's almost bottled in 'I pini del Gianicolo' from Respighi's Pini di Roma, admittedly set on the wrong hill (but there are oranges on the Janiculum too). Coming back home I immediately ordered a recording of that picturesque orchestral work.

It's one of those pieces I've always disliked, a belligerent fad of a belligerent teenager determined to show that he wasn't always dazzled by style over supposed substance. I had resisted Pini di Roma for many years until Riccardo Chailly almost convinced me of the work's merits back in 2010 at the Barbican. But this week, as London played vernal catchup with southern Europe, it was Antonio Pappano's 2007 recording with the native Orchestra dell' Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia that finally melted me. Musical postcards, I've realised, are absolutely fine... in fact they're all too rare. And Respighi pens a particularly fine accurate one, almost as if it were perfumed with orange blossom. Click here to order a dose of the Janiculum.

No More Seasons

2013-04-19T19:49:00.001+01:00

It happened that once or twice a week I and my friends went out in Manes Reisiger's cab into the so-called 'environs' of Zlotogrod. We referred to these tips as 'outings'. Often we would stop at Jadlowker's frontier tavern. Old Jadlowker, an ancient, silver-bearded Jew, sat outside the mighty arch of his broad, grass-green double-doors, stiff and half-paralysed. He resembled winter who wanted to enjoy the last fine days of autumn and take them with him into the rapidly approaching eternity that would know no more seasons.

This passage is from Joseph Roth's The Emperor's Tomb, recently published by Granta in spankingly fresh translation by Michael Hofmann. It is the summer of 1914 and, in one of the many generic outposts of the Habsburg Empire, the local barracked regiment is enjoying the balmy days of summer. The chapter ends with a proclamation from Emperor Franz Joseph, announcing war.

Roth is the master of unfolding a history 'while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along'. Rather than the tufty-bearded Franz Josef, it is the innkeeper who tolls the nell of the old order, echoing King Lear, Schubert's Winterreise and a whole host of other holy fools. Roth is never grandiose or glib, he merely notes that history is what happens in the every day, between you and me. Click here to order a copy of Hofmann's translation of The Emperor's Tomb.

The Young Pornographer

2013-04-18T09:06:00.001+01:00

This picture yields few clues as to its creator, though the female subject would become its artist's prime concern during his brief life. Drawn at the age of 16 by Egon Schiele – just as he began his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna – the cover of his sketchbook shows a Jugendstil-esque representation of Margarete Partonek, Schiele's first major love. She lived in Klosterneuburg, where Schiele went to school and he penned his first poems to Partonek, some of which were recently acquired by the Leopold Musuem in Vienna.

The sketchbook, however, is now on show at the Egon Schiele Museum in his hometown of Tulln. The volume, fragile but filled with sketches, initially seems like a picturesque affair given the later radical painter imprisoned for pornography. Charming images of Tulln and Krems, around the bend of the Danube, or a train skirting through the Wachau countryside, are hardly analogous with the stretched sinews and strained gazes of his later pictures.

Yet next to these postcard representations is a series of coloured pen and ink drawings, given intensity by their medium but also their subject. There's a film noir quality to a city scape, one of Schiele's first responses to Vienna. In another, a dark motorcar hurtles towards the viewer. But most tellingly, Schiele's severe black and white self-portrait – more like a woodcut – is a potent prediction of the representations of the self that were to come. To see more images from the sketchbook visit the Entartete Musik Facebook page or click here for more information about the exhibition.

About Suffering

2013-04-16T08:54:00.002+01:00

I normally loathe Sunday-evening TV. Cosy and self-congratulatory, all too often it proves to be the audio-visual equivalent of a mug of cocoa. While the Germans ponder their collective guilt, we've had the pretty but inaccurate Downton Abbey, various poor cousins – the hideous Mr Selfridge being the worst offender – and an endless round of pointless remakes.

The Village, currently on BBC One on a Sunday evening, is a much needed break from that tedious norm. While the trappings of a period perfect Sunday night are much in evidence, there is a violent and upsetting core to this drama, a veracity that is all too often lacking elsewhere.

Peter Moffat's survey of the life of a Derbyshire village around the outbreak of war in 1914 is his attempt to create 'an English Heimat'. It's a bold promise. Edgar Rietz's pioneering series is the model of slow paced detailed drama. It thrives in the smallness of our world and eschews big set pieces. Having watched the first three episodes of The Village, however, I can confirm that while it doesn't quite touch the magic of Rietz's creation – remember those weird but wonderful shifts from black and white to colour? – like Heimat, the real drama in The Village happens on the sidelines. Everyone, à la Chekhov, has a story, from the youngest to the oldest, including the cows.

The most moving example of that evenhandedness was to be found in Matt Stokoe's performance as the conscientious objector teacher Gerard Eyre. Committed to his cause, vilified by those at home – not by oh-so-wholesome farmer's lad Joe – but driven by a desire to protect those in his care, Stokoe's performance brilliantly tapped one of the most nefarious witch hunts in Britain's history. There, just as in Heimat, Moffat and his director Antonia Bird show that 'suffering [...] takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.' The Village continues on Sunday night; let's hope it doesn't capitulate to cosy market forces.

Thigh-slapping Gemütlichkeit

2013-04-15T16:58:00.002+01:00

Although a recent spate of American television programmes has revived close harmony singing, mass entertainment killed the partsong. Up until the mid 20th century, it was a central part of our musical culture. Ironically in Austria at the beginning of the 19th century, as culture was forced indoors by the state chancellor Prince Klemens von Metternich, the artform thrived. Schubert, ever the party animal, obliged with a number of winning examples.

Many of the works performed on this new disc from Harmonia Mundi were composed for the ‘Schubertiade’ or friends’ gatherings that have become the stuff of Schubert legend. Yet despite some fine singing and playing from this clutch of leading Schubertians, I remained unconvinced that they suit a recorded medium.

The partsongs and party pieces are a real rejoinder to those (including me of occasion) who think Schubert was a forlorn figure within Viennese society. They are jolly works, which require punch and pizzaz in performance. Marlis Petersen, Anke Vondung, Werner Güra and Konrad Jarnot offer a suitably fizzy quartet, with Christoph Berner (on a Rönisch fortepiano) offering equally spirited support. Like much of Schubert's happiest music, it often feels like it's protesting a bit too much, a shiny veneer under which darker truths are lurking. Track after track, the endless thigh-slapping Gemütlichkeit proves a little hard to swallow.

The performances are, however, wonderfully true to the spirit of the compositions, not least the November 1827 composition 'Der Hochzeitsbraten' (a kind of miniature opera manqué). Here Petersen, Güra and Jarnot play up brilliantly to the innuendo in Franz von Schober's text but, like the sillier passages of Die Zauberflöte, it just doesn't quite translate to disc. Witnessed live, these performances would doubtless be endearing, but on disc the forced festivity had me reaching for Winterreise. Click here to order a copy.

Sir Colin Davis (1927-2013) R.I.P.

2013-04-14T22:15:00.003+01:00

The great British conductor Sir Colin Davis has died. The LSO, an orchestra with which Davis had a long association – latterly becoming its president – announced his death earlier this evening. Davis was 85. Illness had recently kept him away from the concert platform, forcing him to stand down from his birthday appearances last autumn and forthcoming performances of Britten's The Turn of the Screw. Known across the Globe, Davis was especially celebrated for performances of Mozart, Berlioz and Sibelius. His association with the LSO was the latest in a long list of significant posts, including roles with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Dresden Staatskapelle, as well as leading Sadler's Wells Opera and the Royal Opera House. As the LSO has remarked, 'he will be remembered with huge affection and admiration'.