The music of the Weimar Republic can now only be heard with political ears. How could this be otherwise? For around a century, it has inescapably evoked resistance against growing tyranny, or complicity with that tyranny, or retreat into decadence in an effort to block out looming disaster. With far-right parties once again in government in Europe, and democracy under attack around the globe, we would surely do well to listen again and try to learn. Accordingly, tonight’s program encourages us to attune our ears to how this music can be political in more nuanced ways, some of them far from straightforward.
To begin with, how can music be democratic? Beethoven famously named his Symphony No. 3 for Napoleon before angrily withdrawing the homage on hearing the news he had crowned himself emperor. It’s perhaps difficult now to appreciate the wild hope that this dashing French general—the triumphant instrument of the people—had inspired in political progressives before that moment (Puccini’s Tosca does quite a good job of representing it), but there seems little doubt that Beethoven felt it deeply. Rather than a celebration of the overthrow of monarchies, the “Eroica” that was eventually premiered in 1805 had been translated into a much more general expression of the human fighting spirit.
Hindemith had a different idea of how music could be egalitarian—not just celebrating greater equality, that is, but actually embodying it. After early exercises in the rich Romantic style of the end of the 19th century—all individual pathos and yearning—he soon turned to a more direct, self-consciously modern kind of composition: clean, crisp, kinetic. This “new objectivity,” as it was called, was adopted by musicians and other artists explicitly in order to reach a broader, less culturally elite public. Knowing what happened next, however (the rise to power of National Socialism within only a few years), it is difficult not to reflect on the fact that populism, however well-meaning, can have a very dark side.
Gustav Mahler represented rather precisely what was being left behind by the music of the 1920s, at least in one way: His symphonies in particular seemed (and still seem) individualistic and unashamedly self-indulgent in every imaginable respect. But his conducting and high-level administrative career—one spent negotiating the difficulties of emerging national assertiveness in central Europe, and religious and racial intolerance in particular—was emblematic of what was to come. He often said that he was three times an exile: a Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian in Germany, and a Jew throughout the world—and his musical activity then tended to throw into relief, rather than efface, these lines of division.
But there is also a much simpler kind of musical democratization highlighted in tonight’s program. Before the age of recordings, transcriptions of the masterpieces of the canon for domestic use were an important means of their dissemination. In particular, versions of large-scale orchestral works reduced for piano brought home music that not everyone could experience in the concert hall. This practice served (but also encouraged) a wide musical literacy in the 19th century that is now, alas, much less wide. What has replaced it? Well, one hopeful answer might be the facility of communication technology that has afforded a present-day equivalent: dissemination of musical performance across virtual platforms directly from musician to listener. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Igor Levit was one of the performers, in all genres, who did what he could to keep sharing music as widely as possible with his online “home concerts.” And rather than simply keeping in touch with an audience of which he had been deprived, it soon became apparent that this was a broader humanitarian project, so much so that he wrote a book about it afterwards, interleaving musical communication with his own lived experience of intolerance. For Levit and artists like him, in other words, it’s not just the music of Weimar that must be heard with political ears.
The early life of Hindemith bridged professional and amateur domestic music making. His father was a frustrated performer and (as is sometimes the way) sought to achieve his ambitions through his talented children. Paul had to learn the violin, while his younger sister studied the piano and his younger brother the cello. Together, they formed the Frankfurt Children’s Trio and traveled around the area giving concerts, sometimes accompanied by their father on the zither. This over-enthusiastic parenting led to tension (as is almost always the way), and for a time, Paul and his father were estranged. Nevertheless, musical performance remained close to home for the young Hindemith: He joined his violin teacher’s string quartet and orchestra (that of Oper Frankfurt), and before very long, married the principal conductor’s daughter.
Concentrating on composition rather than performance after the First World War, Hindemith brought to his works the conviction that modern music needed to be closer to modern life. As he put it, “The days of composing only for the sake of composing are perhaps gone forever.” The Suite “1922” certainly places the listener in a particular time and place: Although its march and nocturne have obvious (and numerous) models in the music of previous centuries, and its ragtime movement recalls a style that was already slightly out of date by the Weimar Republic, the “Shimmy” and “Boston” dances are distinctive. The latter involved even steps, but taken in a cross-rhythm spread over two measures; it originated in 1870s America but only became widely known in Continental Europe after the war. The former, which involved shaking the shoulders and upper body (the name probably derives from chemise, “shirt” or “blouse”), reached its peak of international popularity precisely in 1922, through Gilda Gray’s Broadway performances in the Ziegfeld Follies.
Hindemith’s suite brings even the present-day listener closer to the music through its intensely embodied quality. You feel the cross-rhythms as an exciting physical tension, and even if shimmying doesn’t scandalize you as much as it did the more staid dancers of that time, a knowing performance of the insistently seductive chromatic slips upward and downward can’t help but make you tingle a bit. The other movements feel urgent and slightly anxious: The manner is mechanistic (“machine-like,” in Hindemith’s own phrase) but also challenging to listen to, a bit like other 1920s jazz styles but with lots of extra—and somehow angrier—notes. The challenge is not just to the listener but to the player, too: The performance direction for “Ragtime” is: “Disregard what you learnt in your piano lessons. Don’t spend too much time considering whether to strike D-sharp with the fourth or the sixth finger. Play this piece in a very wild manner.”
Mahler is generally acknowledged as the creator not only of some of the most passionate and expansive symphonies in the repertoire, but also of the “curse of the ninth”: the superstition that, following the cautionary examples of Schubert and Beethoven (not to mention Bruckner and Dvořák), no great composer can finish a 10th symphony. He thought he would cheat fate, so the story goes, by calling what was really his ninth symphony The Song of the Earth instead. He quickly went on to complete a Symphony No. 9 with no ill-effects, but only about half of the Tenth was on paper before he was struck down by bacterial endocarditis at age 50. (History reports that Glazunov, Vaughan Williams, Sessions, and Schnittke also failed to learn this vital lesson, all blithely continuing to write symphonies before dying more or less promptly after their ninth.)
This is not the only reason for the special fascination with Mahler’s Tenth. At the request of Mahler’s widow, Alma (and no doubt also on the strength of his relationship with Mahler’s daughter Anna), fellow Austrian composer Ernst Krenek attempted to complete the work, the first and third movements of which were publicly performed in 1924. (Just a year later, he completed his opera Jonny spielt auf, the work that would so offend Nazi ideas of artistic and cultural purity as to lead to their ban on Krenek’s music and immigration to the US.)
In the decades that followed, various other composers and scholars tried to realize the work from the drafts and sketches that Mahler left, but it was soon widely agreed that only the first movement could be convincingly represented as substantially his. The orchestrations of it made by Deryck Cooke between the late 1950s and the late 1980s are still regularly performed and recorded by orchestras. Piano transcriptions, on the other hand, are much rarer: It takes a very special performer to render the sustained string-playing of the orchestral original at the keyboard. Ronald Stevenson—a Scottish pianist, composer, and educator—wrote his version of the movement before any of Cooke’s work was performed or broadcast, basing his study directly on facsimiles of Mahler’s materials. Stevenson had extremely eclectic musical interests, but it seems clear that his intentions in the project were firmly aligned with the idea of transcription as a bridge between professional and amateur domestic music making, and almost certainly with related social and ethical concerns: He would go on to direct a course on “the political piano” at York University and serve as vice president of the Workers’ Music Association, an organization dedicated to “singing and playing music for peace and workers’ rights.”
Liszt was the most famous composer-virtuoso of his time—a time when those two job titles were less distinct than they are now. Most great performers wrote music for themselves to play: What better way to ensure your repertoire suited your own particular strengths? And most great composers were also performers, although this began to change as the 19th century wore on. When Liszt encountered another composer’s piano music, it quickly became the mere basis for his own improvisatory embellishments, and although he certainly worked within the general tradition of transcribing large-scale compositions for a home audience, it could hardly be said that in doing so he “domesticated” them: Most of his versions of then-contemporary opera, in particular, could only have been tackled by pianists of out-of-the-ordinary ability. With its complex layers of texture, huge sounds (especially in the outer movements), and very large-scale design, this version of Beethoven’s “Eroica” is certainly difficult; it very visibly places the pianist in the position of the hero whose struggle it represents. But while impressive in performance, all of Liszt’s transcriptions of Beethoven’s symphonies are also something quite different: They are sincere, respectful homage (not the more self-consciously virtuosic “Fantasies” or “Reminiscences” of evenings in the theater), and they seek to render, to the best of the piano’s ability, the orchestral originals (not “Variations” on or of them).
These multiple functions are evident in the score—and so, occasionally, is the tension between them. While Liszt converts orchestral idioms into pianistic ones (rolled chords, broken octaves, tremolos, different kinds of grace notes) as a matter of course, he also frequently gives the performer instrumental cues, as if to remind them (surely unnecessarily?) of the original they are evoking. But when he includes alternative solutions to the problems of achieving that evocation (using the standard practice of parallel staves marked ossia, meaning “or”), it is not always clear whether the suggestion is supposed to be easier to play (which is the general convention) or harder (which is quite often Liszt’s approach elsewhere). Or, indeed, whether it simply marks a site of freedom shared by composer and performer: “You are at liberty to choose.” In the context of a piece born out of a new idea of what that might mean on the largest scale, these alternatives can appear not just practical but symbolic, and thus doubly to be cherished.
—Cormac Newark