David Holler: Odeon

It's a great honour.

Some time ago American singer/songwrite David Holler read my post on Zurich's Cafe Odeon.  He was inspired to write and record a song about the city's most famous cafe, meeting place for all sorts of bohemians and literati. This week the song has been released, which you can download on iTunes. The official video has been released too, and I'm honoured to be listed among the credits at the end.  David has done a fantastic job: charming, punchy music with a great sequence of historical photos. I love how he rhymes "literaries and Mata Hari's".  And not many contemporary pop songs can boast of lyrics like these:
"Artists painters, sinners and sainters
People paradin’ on the sidewalk down the boulevard
We’ll drink espressos, write manifestos
Chill with Dadaists, expressionists and the Avant-garde"

Enjoy the video.

Wagner Article in History Today Magazine

My article on Richard Wagner and the historical background to his composing of Tristan und Isolde has just appeared in the November issue of History Today, now available in shops like Borders and W.H. Smiths.  You can read the introduction of "Richard and Mathilde" online.

The magazine has also published this video of Leonard Bernstein conducting Tristran und Isolde to coincide with my article.

Modes of Transport and Classical Music

Listening to Schubert's Unfinished Symphony this morning, I had an image of a man, Schubert I suppose, riding a galloping horse.  And I wondered could early 19th century romanticism be linked to the main form of transportation at the time - horse riding? Romantic painters like Delacroix and Gericault certainly loved to give us graphic images of horses straining at the bit, eyes enlarged in fear, nostrals flaring.  Could these wild horses be present in romantic works like Schubert's symphonies as well?

Delacroix: Lion attacking an Arab on a Horse

And now that I think about it, is it a coincidence that the jittering movements  and improvisations of jazz coincide with the onset of our modern obsession, the darting automobile, again reflected in the visual arts in the late works of Mondrian, such as "Broadway Boogie-Woogie".

And what of today? Do not Steve Reich's tedious works of repetition reflect the barley perceptible coughing motion of the modern high-speed train? I can imagine enjoying them on my iPod while riding the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto, but surely not seated on a saddle.  Do not the pared down and depersonalised sounds of the works of Philip Glass reflect the atmosphere of airports and commercial flights? And if I need a parallel from the visual arts, let me pick the abstract  works of Robert Nymann, as white and featureless as the atmosphere through which we fly, broken only by the turbelence of his rippled surface.

Robert Nymann

Marx said something like - show me your technology and I'll show you your government.  Doolan now says, show me your means of transport and I'll show you your music. Just a thought.

Wagner in Zurich

Dawn was breaking on the morning of her 29^th birthday, December 23^rd 1857, when the beautiful and artistically gifted Mathilde Wesendonck, wife of the multi-millionaire Otto Wesendonck, awoke in her bedroom in the splendid palatial mansion that they had had built on a green hill overlooking Lake Zurich.  The sweet and melancholic sound of a chamber orchestra came from downstairs.  Leaving her bedroom she crossed the gallery, with its collection of Old Masters lining the walls and descended the marble grand staircase, to the vestibule below.  There, watched by marble busts of Socrates, Demothenes, Sappho and Augustus and a bronze Hermes, a small group of musicians played exquisite music, composed in her honour for the occasion.  And there, conducting the ensemble, was the composer and organizer of the event, her lover and musical genius, Richard Wagner. The intense relationship that had blossomed between Richard Wagner and Mathilde Wesendonck is not simply of anecdotal interest; their love formed an integral part of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, acknowledged by many to be the greatest opera ever written.

Villa Wesendonck during the time of Wagner

Wagner’s wife, Minna, was at the early morning birthday celebration too.  Wagner had persuaded her to provide the sandwiches and coffee.  But when Mathilde’s husband Otto, who happened to be Wagner’s generous financial patron, returned from a trip abroad he was furious when he heard how, in his absence, Wagner had orchestrated such a scene with his wife and given himself the freedom of the house. Wagner had overstepped the boundary of what was acceptable with this public gesture of intimacy, and the tongues of Zurich’s staid burghers were set to wagging.

Villa Wesendonck today: The Rietberg Museum

Wagner and Otto mended their fences, more or less, and life returned to what constituted normal in Wagner’s world.  He and Minna inhabited a house provided by Otto, next door to the Villa Wesendonck, where Otto and Mathilde lived.  Here, he enjoyed the peace and quiet to compose Tristan und Isolde.

Villa Schoenberg, where Wagner composed Tristan und Isolde

Letters and short notes rifled back and forth between Wagner and Mathilde.  A few months later, in April 1858, this idyllic situation was shattered when his long- suffering wife intercepted one of his letters to Mathilde.  Appalled by its intimacy she claimed (probably wrongly) that it bore witness to an illicit love affair and a scandal ensued. By August the situation had become intolerable. Wagner begged Mathilde to flee with him, but she chose her rich husband rather than her poor composer. Wagner, now estranged from his wife, fled alone to Venice, where he continued to compose Tristan in a palace on the Grand Canal, and continued to correspond with Mathilde.  The following year he returned to Switzerland where he finished Tristan in Lucerne in August, 1859.

Piccard in Space

Art and science are about to meet in a new opera that will premiere at London later this month. Auguste Piccard was born in Basel, Switzerland and studied physics at the world renowned Federal Institute of Technology (the ETH) in Zurich. In 1931 Piccard ascended in his own spherical, aluminum gondola, that hung from a giant balloon, to a height of over 15,500 meters above the earth. He braved the freezing cold, toxic balls of mercury, cosmic radiation and a serious roasting by the sun, in order to find evidence for fellow ETH graduate Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and to study the planet’s stratosphere. No man, or woman (though three years later his sister-in-law would become the first woman to ascend into the stratosphere), had ever gone higher, and this in a time that predates rockets. A year later he made a second ascent from just outside Zurich that took him even higher. Thousands of curious onlookers availed of the special trains that took them from Zurich’s city-centre to watch the mad professor as he climbed into his gondola and disappeared into the midnight sky. It was recorded for the cinema and we can view this event again here.  (Mind you, they wrongly refer to him as a “Belgian professor” – he was a Swiss professor in Brussels.) On this trip he would ascend to an altitude of ten and a half miles. Ultimately, his highest ascent of all reached an incredible 23,000 meters – that’s over twice the altitude of a commercial intercontinental flight today.

The Belgian cartoonist Herge was inspired by Piccard’s exploits and based his character Professor Calculus, the archetypical absent minded mad scientist in The Adventures of Tintin, on Piccard, while the Star Trek character Jean- Luc Picard is also a nod to our Swiss scientist. Now, Piccard is about to be remembered again, this time in opera. Musician and composer Will Gregory has been commissioned by the BBC to compose a work for the BBC orchestra. His opera, “Piccard in Space” will receive its premiere performance on March 31st at London’s South Bank Centre.

Bernard Haitink's Tristan and Isolde at the Zürich Opera House

Zürich Opera House Last Sunday Evening

I arrived back in Zürich last Sunday after a week in Birmingham just in time to see Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Zürich Opera House, conducted by the great Barnard Haitink.

I was amazed by Claus Guth’s  staging.  Act One, for instance, is supposed to take place aboard a ship on which Tristan (Stig Anderson) is bringing Isolde (Barbera Schneider-Hofstetter) from Ireland to Cornwall, where she will marry King Marke (at least that’s the plan – love gets in the way, naturally).  But instead of a ship, the opera opens in what is clearly a large bedroom in a great neo-classical villa. At one point the action moves to a terrace filled with plants, definitely not a ship.  It was only during the second act, when the neo-classical interior architecture continued, that the penny dropped.  Actually, I can’t take the credit – it was Esther who leaned over and whispered into my ear, “It’s supposed to be the Villa Wesendonck”.  Of course – why didn’t I think of that?  So the staging represented, not so much the love story between Tristan and Isolde, but that of Wagner himself and his muse, Mathilde Wesendonck. The location had been moved from a ship to the place where Wagner had written the opera,  the mansion of his lover and muse, right here in Zürich, the Villa Wesendonck (today’s Rietberg Museum).  This was a stroke of genius.

The birthplace of Tristan and Isolde: Villa Wesendonck

Another intriguing aspect of this staging was the role of  Brangaene (played by Michelle Breedt), Isolde’s maidservant. The two were visual doubles of each other, wearing the same costumes and the same hairstyles and, uncannily, even sounding a little like each other. It seems that Brangaene was meant to represent Isolde’s conscience, or more precisely, her rational self.  Thank goodness for the drama of opera; Isolde ignored her reasonable advice, and threw herself into illegitimate love instead.

Looking old and frail, conductor Bernard Haitink invested the entire evening with terror and sadness, euphoria and contemplation through his convincing performance.  The orchestra was outstanding, though perhaps too loud here and there as the singers were drowned out.

Isolde discovers near dead Tristan in the Villa Wesendonck

This was an original interpretation of one of the world’s greatest ever operas and again I was struck by the Buddhist metaphysics that form the core of the entire enterprise.  If you want to know more about the Buddhist aspect of this work, or wish to read about the personal background to the work’s creation, read my earlier posting Wagner and Buddha: Tristan and Isolde and if you want to take a tour of Wagner's see check out my A Stroll Through Wagner's Zurich.

The Very Clever Esther

Radu Lupu in the Tonhalle, Zurich

Talking or writing about music is difficult. Describing a painting is one thing, but how does one even start to describe a Beethoven piano sonata? Frank Zappa is reported to have said, or was it Elvis Costello: “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” Regardless of who said it, and it might even have been Frank Lloyd Wright, or Martin Mull (Martin who?) or even Clara Schumann, it does summarise the difficulty adequately.


Writing on music tends to be either overly technical or a list of similes. Very few can manage to do it well. Alas, I am inept. And this is a pity, because on Sunday night I experienced a musical evening that was unforgettable – indeed the music resonated so deeply that hours after the concert it still wouldn’t leave my mind and kept me awake. Unfortunately I can’t describe architecture very well by dancing and I cannot share the music by writing about it.

The recital was by the great Romanian pianist, Radu Lupu, performing Janacek, Beethoven and Schubert in Zurich’s Tonhalle. During Lupu’s interpretation of Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata I felt he was close to unfolding a sound picture that would manifest a truth, but one which does not lend itself to translation into words. Perhaps for this reason Lupu plays the piano, and seldom if ever gives interviews. He sat before the magnificent grand piano looking utterly relaxed, his fingers barely touching the keys, like an ancient Hindu sage sending out messages of wisdom encrypted in music. Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B Flat is one of my favourite pieces of music. Radu Lupu seemed to play it, not with his fingers, but with his being. There was an extraordinary lack of intensity in his approach; instead, with little outward demonstration of effort, he offered the lightness of the Zen master. He was in such command of his instrument that, ironically, the effect was that Radu Lupu himself was erased and the music alone was revealed.

At the end of the concert he bowed, and left the stage, returned, bowed, and left again. As the applause grew louder he returned to the stage, bowed, sat before the piano and immediately began to play again – the first of two encores. The second encore was one of Schubert’s Impromptus, but though I recognized the first, or at least seemed to, I couldn’t quite place it, and have failed to identify it since. To call it incredibly beautiful would be an understatement. It was perfect.

If any reader happened to be at the concert and knows which piece it was, I would love to know.

David Zinman and the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich

I was pleased to see an article from Hugh Canning in The Times last week praising Zurich's Tonhalle Orchestra.  While criticising the pervasive tendency of ranking the best orchestras of the world, as if they are in some sort of beauty contest, he does claim that: "Among the historic symphonic ensembles of Europe, the Tonhalle Orchestra of Zürich is perhaps the one whose profile has risen most spectacularly in the past decade or so."  This is in no small measure due to the leadership of the orchestra's conductor and musical director David Zinman.  He is perhaps most famous for what some, including myself, consider to be THE classical musical recording of the 1990s - Gorecki's Third Symphony, conducted by Zinman, played by the London Sinfonietta with Dawn Upshaw. The languorously beautiful but heartbreakingly sad melodies, combined with Upshaw's voice, with its depth of feeling, have made this a bestseller. Since then Zinman has raised the Tonhalle Orchestra's reputation worldwide.  Their recordings of all of Beethoven's symphonies have sold more than a million copies and this year will see the completion of their releases on CD of all of Mahler's symphonies - the 8th has just been released.  Last month Zinman and the Tonhalle Orchestra performed all of Brahms' symphonies live in the Tonhalle (Brahms himself once conducted the Tonalle Orchestra) and these live concerts were recorded for release in the near future. As well as becoming a major player in the world of classical CDs, Zinman and his orchestra are in high demand all over the world at major festivals, such as the Royal Proms last year.

A couple of months ago my wife and I attended a concert at the Tonhalle of Wagner's Act One of Die Walkure.  Zinman and his orchestra were in tremendous form and even Esther, most definitely NOT a Wagner fan (in an act of great selflessness, she had bought the tickets as a gift for me), was bowled over.  But I was worried as Zinman is 74 years old and his contract ends this year.  I was pleased to read that he has just signed a new contract, which will keep him at the helm until the tender age of 79.  Surely that is a clear demonstration of a man who loves his work.  It makes me wonder, will I still want my day job if I live to 79?

Bruckner's Mass in F Minor

                 Tonhalle, Zürich (photo: Andreas Praefcke)

Yesterday it was 25 years since my wife and I had our first date – April Fool’s Day.

Twenty five years ago we went to Bach’s Matthäus Passion, in Groningen, Holland.  Last night we celebrated by attending Bruckner’s Mass in F Minor at the Tonhalle in Zürich, together with our three children.  It dawned on us afterwards that for over half of our 25 years we have been parents, our eldest having just turned 13.

Whenever I enter the Tonhalle I feel like I am threading on hallowed ground, and I can’t help but feel the presence of history.  Since its opening in 1895 it has gained a reputation for having one of the finest acoustics in the world. No less a figure than Brahms himself conducted on the very first opening night.  Since then such greats as Karl Böhm, Wilhelm Fürtwangler, Otto Klemperer, Bernard Haitink and Wolfgang Sawallisch have followed his example.  The in house conductor and musical director today is David Zinman and recent musicians who played under his baton include Yo-Yo Ma, Krystian Zimerman and Alfred Brendal.  Esther and I already have our tickets to see Radu Lupu in June.

           After the performance

Last night's was a stellar performance by the Kollegium Wintertur (founded in 1629, making them one of Europe’s oldest musical ensembles) and the Mixed Choir of Zürich, founded in 1863.  The evening included two of Bruckner’s motets – challenging pieces for any choir because of their exceeding complex polyphony and rich harmonic language– which are performed acapella, increasing the difficulty for the choir as they have to change key and modulation abruptly, without the support of any instruments.  But the choir, led by their conductor Joachim Krause, did an outstanding job.  My eight year old did fall asleep on my lap, but the 11 and 13 year olds, fans of Rhianna rather than classical music, were engrossed throughout the one and a half hour performance.

It was wonderful to celebrate our anniversary in this way, though there was one big difference.  I sat among the audience with our three children; Esther was on stage singing.  Although photos are not allowed during the performance, I did sneak this one quick, not very clear, one. Esther is in the back row, second from the left.

Wagner and Buddha, Tristan and Isolde

Just over one hundred and fifty years ago Richard Wagner finished Tristan and Isolde, a work that many consider to be the greatest opera ever composed.  Less well known, is the fact that Tristan and Isolde can also be considered the first great artwork of western Buddhism.

From 1849 until 1858 Wagner spent almost ten of his most creative years in Zürich, Switzerland, as a German political refugee.  It was there in 1854 that he encountered Buddhism, via the work of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.  Schopenhauer was the first mainstream European philosopher to take Hindu and Buddhist ideas seriously. His The World as Will and Idea had initially appeared nearly four decades earlier, in 1818, but had been all but ignored.  According to Schopenhauer’s Buddhist inspired ideas, behind the world of phenomena is one vast, timeless will.  All else, the world of perception and plurality, of space and time, objects and actions, is an illusion, the result of a process of individuation.  Schopenhauer even used the Buddhist term, “Maya” to describe this illusion. What is real is will, not phenomenal representations or Maya.  Most people live their lives within the veiled illusion of what is temporal and never discover reality. A blind attachment to temporal phenomena keeps the subject locked within the veil of illusion. To break free from this is possible, according to Schopenhauer, by means of detaching oneself from desire through the act of renunciation.

It is no exaggeration to say that Wagner reacted to this as if he had experienced an epiphany. His philosophical encounter with Schopenhauer and then Buddhism, changed the course of his career and, consequently, western music.  Many years later Wagner himself remembered his introduction to Schopenhauer’s thought as being “decisive for the rest of my life”. 

Wagner quickly threw himself into the study of the few primary works and secondary commentaries on Buddhism that were then available, reading not just in German but in French too.  Within a year he wrote that the deepest truths in history were those “purest revelations of most noble humanity in the old Orient”.  He followed Schopenhauer’s example and kept a statue of Buddha in his living room.  In 1856 he read Eugene Burnouf’s Introduction a l’histoire du bouddhisme and, in his memoirs, he remembered that “I even distilled from it the material for a dramatic poem which has remained with me ever since.”  This was, in fact, nothing less than a plan to write an opera about the Buddha, which he called The Victors.  He made a prose sketch of the three acts and it was clearly a work close to his heart, a project he would never quite give up on, but which would remain incomplete at the time of his death.  According to some recent commentators, however, he integrated most of the ideas that he had planned for The Victors into his final masterpiece, Parsifal. In 1883, while visiting Venice, he returned to his beloved project, The Victors, but died while writing at his desk.  His final words referred to the Buddha: “There is something pleasing about the legend which tells how even the Victorious and Perfect One (the Buddha) was persuaded into admitting women followers.”

There is no doubt that Wagner believed western civilization was suffering from the disease of materialism and its virtues had been warped through the pursuit of power.  He firmly believed that Eastern ideas, and in particular Buddhist thought, could save the west.  On a personal level he found consolation in Buddhism as he wrote: “Only the deeply wise postulation of the transmigration of souls could show me the consoling point at which all creatures will finally reach the same level of redemption”.  This belief in transmigration, an “appealing Buddhist doctrine” according to Wagner, came to influence his music. He perfected the use of leitmotivs, sequences of notes and chords that would be repeated throughout a work.  This is evident in his 16-hour opera The Ring of Nibelung, but became an essential part of his last, most metaphysical work, Parsifal.  By the time he came to compose this last work, he explained the use of the leitmotiv: “For the spirit of the Buddha, the previous lives of every being he meets are just as accessible as the immediate present…. I immediately recognized that this double existence could only be made clear to the feelings through the constant presence of audible musical reminiscences”.  As his wife, Cosimo Wagner, reported him as saying: “Only music is capable of rendering this, the mystery of reincarnation”.

By the summer of 1857 Wagner had reached the conclusion that to achieve nirvana would involve a turning away from the world of phenomena, with its senseless trivialities, and a renunciation of desire, especially sexual desire, would bring about salvation. Desire, including sexual desire, was something of which Wagner had plenty of experience. Although married, he had long been a serial adulterer.  His newest love, Mathilde Wesendonck, was young, intelligent, beautiful and married to Wagner’s multi-millionaire benefactor.  It is the happy confluence of Schopenhauer’s and Buddhist ideas, together with his increasingly erotically charged relationship with Mathilde Wesendonck, and the opportunity that this gave to practice renunciation, that led Wagner to Tristan and Isolde.  In the summer of 1857 Wagner commenced work on this, the greatest of operas. 

Mathilde Wesendonck by K. F. Sohn

Although the story is a medieval, Germanic tale, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde is infused with Buddhist ideas.  The music alone is a lesson in Buddhist thought as it produces an aching desire in the listener, a yearning to satisfy this desire that is never fulfilled, but continually postponed until at last, with the final sound, discord is resolved and only silence remains. The opening chord, perhaps the most analyzed chord in music history, is known simply as “the Tristan chord”.  It produces two dissonances, evoking in the listener an inevitable aching desire for resolution, but this does not quite arrive.  Instead, one dissonance is resolved with the following chord, but not the other, and so one is left with the desire, the painful yearning for resolution, and a partial satisfaction that only leads to a growing, desire. And on it goes, an agonizing journey with partial fulfillment but never ending desire producing the suffering that is, according to Buddhists, a part of the fabric of the phenomenal world, until, at last, resolution is achieved, but only with the very final chord.  The music itself is Buddhist philosophy, not in words, but in musical chords.

Tristan and Isolde by J.W. Waterhouse

The lovers, Tristan and Isolde, attempt to achieve nirvana, or redemption, by fleeing the world of day and entering permanently into the world of night, a metaphor for the Buddhist act of renunciation or detachment. At first the lovers inhabit the phenomenal world of daylight, the world of illusion.  This light of day, the veil of illusion, in true Buddhist style, is the source of all pain.  As Tristan describes it:

               is there one grief

               or one pain

               that it does not awaken

               with its light? 

Night, a metaphor for the act of renunciation, is the place where the infinitude of will, and consequently the non-self, can be experienced.  Night lies beyond space and time, where knowledge and reason can be seen as nothing more than the veil of illusion.  Isolde sings to her lover how they will live in the night and experience:

               an end to deception

               where the presaged dream

               of delusion would vanish 

If one gives oneself to the dark, then those things of the daylight, like the pursuit of wealth and power, are scattered, in Tristan’s words:

             like barren dust in the sun 

The selfless love for each other that Tristan and Isolde feel in the realm of night is a metaphor for the discarding of the illusory, individual self.  They enter into the Buddhist realm of non-self. The opera ends when, with Tristan already dead, Isolde sings her now famous death song and is transfigured by a feeling of bliss as she enters into the vast wave of the world’s breath.  Her words must constitute one of the first times that Buddhist thought speaks in western art:

               In the surging swell

               in the ringing sound,

               in the vast wave

               of the world’s breath –

               to drown,

               to sink

               unconscious –

               Supreme bliss. 

Wagner finished Tristan and Isolde in Lucerne, Switzerland, in August 1859. The following year, in Paris, his new work was met with bafflement.  He felt alone and misunderstood and it had been years since any new work of his had reached the public. In a state of melancholy, he wrote to his muse, Mathilde Wesendonck: “I often turn my gaze towards the land of Nirvana.  But for me Nirvana turns rapidly to Tristan”.  In other words, for Wagner, to hear this exquisite music comes close to experiencing Nirvana.  We might disagree, but we can hardly doubt that Wagner was genuinely grappling with the Buddhist concepts that were than available to westerners.  He had started down a path that some are still following.

Wagner first recited the libretto for Tristan and Isolde and played the entire music on piano in Mathilde Wesendonck’s palatial villa overlooking Lake Zürich.  Today that villa, now known as the Rietberg Museum, is open to the public.  It is a museum of non-western art. By happy coincidence, this place that once saw the birth of the first great work of European Buddhist art, is now the home of an incomparable collection of Buddhist art. 

Villa Wesendonck, Zurich, 1857

         

For more on Wagner in Zurich see my A Stroll Through Wagner's Zurich