A Road Better Never Traveled

In an excellent blog post, classical music journalist, associate music editor of Time Out Chicago, and blogger Marc Geelhoed of Deceptively Simple writes:

[Conductor] Kent Nagano is a smart man, with bold ideas about repertoire and how music relates to our society, so listeners should take him seriously when he shares those. In 2002, he led the premiere of Wolfgang Rihm’s Das Lesen der Schrift (The Reading of the Scripts), which he had commissioned from the composer with the intention that its movements would serve as brief oases between the seven movements of Brahms’ German Requiem. [...] The Scripts would afford audiences a chance to reflect on the texts they had just heard sung and the music they had just heard, as well as to gather their strength for the journey ahead.

Excuse me? That very idea is so perversely wrongheaded, so jaw-droppingly mindless, so unmitigatedly philistine that on reading the above one immediately suspects Mr. Geelhoed has either fallen victim to a bout of ironic excess, or is engaging in a setup for some far-out musical joke.

No such luck. It's instead merely prelude to a report by Mr. Geelhoed of an actual performance of the German Requiem that was presented at a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert this past Thursday wherein the Rihm was interlaced between the seven movements of the Brahms, the performance preceded by a ten-minute explanatory talk from the stage by conductor Kent Nagano. Mr. Geelhoed wasn't pleased with the idea overall, but allows that, for instance, in the sixth movement, "Had Brahms stayed in a single style or mood, Nagano’s decision to interleave another piece of music could be defensible."

To the contrary, no reason or circumstance on earth or in heaven can defend such a philistine act of vandalism.

In the 18th century it was not all that uncommon to interject other works such as a concert aria or two between movements of, say, a four-movement symphony; a practice that today would be unthinkable. But before the late-middle-period symphonies of Mozart, the four movements of a symphony were connected or associated in name and by accepted form only, and did not, as an artwork, constitute a single, unified, organic whole. By the time of the death of Beethoven (1827), just about every piece of music written by composers everywhere that wasn't written as incidental music for something else constituted, or aspired to constitute, a single, unified, organic whole no matter how many movements the work comprised.

And such is Brahms's seven-movement German Requiem, the bulk of which was composed in 1866, the work completed in 1868. To interject any other music, no matter how seemingly appropriate, between those seven organically unified movements can be considered as nothing other than a philistine act of willful vandalism, as I've already remarked, no matter how well intentioned.

Or is this just another instance of the pervasive, imbecile and equalitarian postmodern lunacy which, on one hand, attempts to make classical music more understandable to the ignorant masses, and especially to the ignorant young, by presenting the great masterpieces of the past in such a way as to make them more "accessible," "relevant," and "entertaining" no matter the violence done to those masterpieces in the process; and on the other, attempts to give voice to the largely creatively impotent present by altering those great masterpieces through the agency of imposing on them a "relevant" contemporary commentary or twist? It seems more than a coincidence that this present bit of vandalism comes fast on the heels of The Tristan Project which in its original form presented that perhaps most unified organic whole of all, Wagner's three-act music-drama, Tristan und Isolde, a single act per concert, each act preceded by a work by a different composer who was influenced by Wagner, and with each act "enhanced" by projecting behind and around the performers the unmitigatedly tacky, quasi-erotic, kitsch videos of videographer Bill Viola.

Time for this imbecile and equalitarian postmodern lunacy to cease. As history, that ultimate adjudicator of aesthetic worth, has taught us, both Brahms and Wagner knew precisely what they were doing, and require no assistance from anyone. All they require is the thoughtful, conscientious realization of their scores by sensitive, skilled musicians. The rest will follow of itself as does a blossoming rose the attentions of a skilled gardener. Pandering to proles and to the egos of the largely creatively impotent present is not — is never — the right way to go for high culture. That way is the road to an irreparable corruption of our priceless cultural heritage, and the road to ineluctable cultural meltdown; a road better never traveled.