Cross purposes MUSIC
CHARLES REID
Two of last week's Royal Festival Hall concerts made a three-cornered historical conjunction as well as being rich or engrossing on their own account. Rudolf Kempe and the Royal Phil- harmonic Orchestra gave us Stravinsky's Fire- bird Suite (a good performance; the audience all but bounced in their seats) before moving on to Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben. The Strauss performance was hardly as good. This need not surprise us. A pantechnicon of sounds, noises and 'story' notions, Heldenleben of its nature precludes the degree of polish and preci- sion we hope for in works of lighter build and more sensitive scoring. There is so much to get right that something always goes slightly wrong.
In the thick of the Battle Scene I thought back to the contained dynamics and marbled surfaces of a Debussy rarity, Le Martyre de Saint Sdbas- lien (1911), which Pierre Boulez had conducted for the Royal Philharmonic Society two nights before. To Debussy's music and what Debussy said about Strauss's tonepoem I will return. Meantime a word about Strauss on Firebird.
Meeting Stravinsky backstage after the first Berlin performance of the ballet, he spoke of the score's pianissimo opening, that magical grope and grumble of muted double-basses, with trombone thirds syncopating softly and sinisterly in the background. In Strauss's view all this was a mistake. People simply didn't listen to pianis- simo openings. You had to surprise them with a big bang in the first bar. 'After that ' he con- cluded, 'you can do what you like with them.'
Stravinsky was, as his memoirs tell us, amused. He might have retorted that, like many another self-appointed mentor, Strauss did not always follow his own advice. What of the hushed, palpitating strings and limps' which open Tod and Verkliirung? What, indeed, of the opening of Ein Heldenleben itself? The unison of the ,'Hero' motif, or motif-chain, has a forte mark- ing, to be sure. But it isn't the sort of forte that knocks us on the head or is intended to. The purpose is to make us think musically, that is, to say analytically. So much of the remaining structure stems from this first page that our wits as well as our ears should be alert from first beat to last. That we have to put up with quite a lot of things on the way is not to be gainsaid. The naive din of the Battle, for one thing. For another, the high kicks and coquetries that mar the violin solo, supposedly a portrait of the Hero's lovemate. But the main tunes are among Strauss's best. What is more, he deploys, contrasts and combines them with an athleticism which seems to have carried awav Debussy in spite of himself.
In a critical essay after an early Heldenleben performance in Paris, Debussy owned that some of its ideas, or Strauss's way cf launching them, verged on the commonplace. But he exclaimed admiringly over the music's sustained drive and emotional purchase, qualities which made the score seem shorter than it was and which, of themselves, revealed the composer as near to having genius. If 'near to' sounds cagey, we must remember the enormous contemporary gap between French and German ways of think- ing and feeling. All things considered, Debussy's salute was a cordial one.
What Strauss in turn thought or Le Martyre is not recorded. We are left with Debussy's own assessment. When a storm blew up, or was blown up by bien peasants. over the mingled paganism and hagiology of Gabriele d'Annun- zio's French text, with its switches from the gates of Hades to those of Paradise, from invocations of Apollo and Eros to chorusing minis and martyrs, Debussy explained defensively that Nature was his religion. . . When I gaze at a sunset an extraordinary emotion overwhelms me. I fold my hands in adoration . . This is decorative music . . . Is the faith it expresses orthodox or not? I cannot say. Certainly, the faith it expresses is my own.'
Intended for miming and dancing, with inter- ludes or accompaniments by solo or chorus singers and narrator, Le Martyre in its original form went on for five hours, the music being `incidental.' How reshape a five-hour enter- tainment to fit the second half of a concert programme without making the whole thing unintelligible? M Boulez and his BBC forces were ill served by a programme which didn't print either what the singers were singing or what M Aminel, the Speaker, was speaking. Four microphones in front of the platform and two hanging from the ceiling may have made everything plain to Third Programme listeners. If my own experience is anything to go by, however, people in the hall who hadn't con- trived to beg or steal a Durand vocal score (which seems textually incomplete anyway) understood about one word in ten. When M Aminel got really worked up we wondered what he was going on about. The music remained. And remains. Coloured by external styles as far wide of 'thumbprint' Debussy as Parsifal, it is strengthened rather than sapped by eclec- ticism. Durand publish a suite of fragments symphoniques from Le Martyre which hasn't `made' the repertory. Time to give it a dusting, I would say.
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