Ingo Metzmacher leads BSO in Hartmann and Mozart

Boston Symphony Orchestra (bso.org)
Saturday, 26 February
Ingo Metzmacher, conducting
Hartmann, Symphony No. 4 for String Orchestra 
(American premiere;  marking the 100th anniversary of the composer’s birth)
Mozart, Serenade No. 10 in B-flat for winds, K.361 (370a)

Feb. 26 performance reviewed by Karl Henning.

Once upon a time, there was a real composer named Antonio Salieri, who in truth enjoyed the steady musical employment which eluded Mozart. This is a classic instance of a mediocre composer finding reward in his place and time, in contrast to a great composer who struggles for recognition.

In our day, there is a character named Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus. Now, Amadeus is not a documentary; it is not history; but it is fine theatre, and an engaging play loosely based on historical personages. Shaffer’s Salieri is not the historical Salieri, but is a creative extension of the antagonist in the “what if?” verse drama by Pushkin, Mozart i Salieri; Pushkin’s work, in turn, was the basis for a Rimsky-Korsakov opera.

In Shaffer’s play (I don’t recall whether this survived into the movie adaptation), Salieri gives voice to an ecstatic appreciation of the Adagio from the Mozart Gran Partita, which is playing off-stage. The drama hinges upon the friction between Salieri’s being musician enough, that he has a heightened appreciation of the genius in Mozart; and yet jealous and petty enough, to connive at Mozart’s destruction.

In Symphony Hall, the Serenade No. 10 (Gran Partita) was a tour de force, a marvel of expertly varied textures unfolding to the ear’s unfailing delight for nearly an hour. (In contrast, I have played some band arrangements in which the texture got wearisome before five minutes had run their course.) I don’t know the name of the contrabassist who played the only non-wind instrument in the Mozart, but he was the sole member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra who was on stage for the entire concert. That one instrument, and its expansion of the register of the piece downward, made a disproportionately enormous difference ... a difference which would not have been supplied by (say) substitution of a tuba (which had not yet been invented in Mozart’s day), or contrabassoon (which had).

It would be criminal negligence on my part, to fail to speak of Bill Hudgins, whose principal clarinet was primer inter pares in a strong and unfailingly musical ensemble. The purity and sweetness of his tone alone would have drawn forth Salieri’s encomium.

If it is not disrespectful to Mozart to say it, his Gran Partita was something of an afterthought in this program. Really the occasion here was the US premiere (after an unconscionable 50 years) of Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Symphony No. 4, for strings only. (The Symphony No. 4 is only the second work by Hartmann to be performed here at Symphony; the first was the Symphony No. 6, in 1962.) When Maestro Metzmacher recorded the Hartmann with the Bamberg Philharmonic (where he is Principal Guest Conductor), he programmed it together with Messiaen’s Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, a piece for winds with large percussion compliment; and when the BSO approached Metzmacher for this occasion, he wanted to recreate this pairing. But as it turned out, James Levine had already programmed the Messiaen for December of 2004 - and how often does it transpire that two conductors want to program the same Messiaen piece, with the same American orchestra, in the same season? Could Boston’s best Winter Street psychics have portended so?

In this centenary year, Metzmacher acts in the capacity of Hartmann’s ambassador, a role he pursues with conviction and passion. But Metzmacher, who made his US debut with the Los Angeles Opera in March of 1996, is also a champion of American music. His EMI recording debut was a disc of Ives, recorded with Ensemble Modern; and the BSO concert he which led last season featured the premiere of Elliott Carter’s Boston Concerto, a BSO commission.

To balance the Hartmann string symphony on this program, Metzmacher wanted a work for winds, but the Messiaen piece was already bespoken. So the Mozart Serenade was selected instead.

Of his prodigy son, Leopold Mozart once wrote: “If it is ever to be my duty to convince the world of this miracle, it is at this very time when people ridicule whatever bears the name of miracle and defy all miracles.” The fashion in our own day, partly indeed fostered by Shaffer’s depiction in Amadeus, seems to concentrate more on the image of a potty-mouthed, inconsiderate boor, rather than on a complete musician, not of rare abilities (strictly speaking) but endowed with abilities of rare refinement and excellence. It is a kind of iconoclasm, I expect: emphasize the feet of clay, and we have somehow neutralized the incomprehensible divine flame, this extraordinary creature with musical perceptions and aptitudes at a dizzying remove from most of us - from most, of even the most cultivated of us. Like Salieri, one needs a certain degree of native talent, to be in the position to wish to take Mozart down, perhaps.

In the case of Karl Amadeus Hartmann, we are faced with something of a miracle of a different character. The story of the rise of Nazism in Germany; the disbelief of most sensible Germans, and their catastrophic failure to perceive the significance of the Nazis’ increasing barbarity; the flight of so many cultural and intellectual figures, and the unenviable (indeed, at times contemptible) compromises accepted by the artists and intellects who remained; this is all a matter of general knowledge. But that an artist was revolted by Hitler, that he despised all that the dictator stood for, and yet remained in Germany in a voluntary, internal exile, a state in which he could not expect any of his music to be performed - the rare heroism of Hartmann is a story which seems only now to be spreading abroad.

Hartmann knew exactly what the Nazis were about, at an early date; Hitler’s first failed Putsch was a misadventure in Munich, Hartmann’s home city. In 1935, Hartmann composed a symphonic poem, Miserae, which was published with the dedication: “To my friends, who perished by the hundreds, and who rest in eternal sleep - we do not forget you, Dachau 1933/1934.” The Nazis took note, and Hartmann’s music saw no performances in Germany from then, until the end of the war.

Ingo Metzmacher characterizes the second movement of the Symphony No. 4, Allegro di molto, risoluto, as “something of a danse macabre”. In some of the activity of that movement, as well as to a lesser degree in some of the “breath” of the slow outer movements, I hear some little sonic kinship to Shostakovich.

I meant that musically, and not biographically; though in fact the comparisons and contrasts with Shostakovich arise quite naturally. Hartmann was not at all naive about the Nazis; it can be argued that Shostakovich was naive about the Communists at first. It is a matter of debate, to what degree Shostakovich’s work might be considered ‘dissident’; Hartmann’s disapproval of Berlin was a matter of absolutely no doubt. Moscow took an at times uncomfortably close interest in Shostakovich; apart from denying his music any performances, it seems that Berlin left Hartmann largely unmolested. The war was almost a complete dry spell for Hartmann; where I have heard it argued that, with Moscow’s attentions gripped by the war effort, writing the ‘Leningrad’ Symphony may ironically have been one of Shostakovich’s happiest musical endeavors.

Among 20th-century composers, Hartmann stands out, too, for an easy selflessness. The war ended, and notwithstanding the fact that he himself had received so little musical support (and was in the peculiar position of an elder-yet-unknown composer), he dedicated himself to presenting new music by other composers, in the Musica Viva series which he established in Munich. He stood up in defense of younger-generation composers, even when their aesthetics were much at odds with his own (Boulez being one notable example). Hans-Werner Henze is said to have acknowledged, “Without Karl Amadeus Hartmann, there could have been no Henze.” Hartmann’s is in many ways a story little short of astonishing.

There is a partly uncomfortable question, which we may not be able to answer yet, and which we ought not to seek to petrify: To what extent do we concentrate on the beautiful story … and in appreciating the story’s human importance, do we gauge the importance and worth of the music, by the story. It is not a new concern in the realm of 20th-century music. The musical world appears pretty much to have settled in favor of the actual musical merits of, say, Messiaen’s Quatuor pour le fin du temps (which was composed in a prison camp) and of, well, the great bulk of the Shostakovich catalogue. There’s a purely artistic level, at which we ask, is the music of value only (or mostly) as an artifact of the great story of the artist’s life? Or is it great music independent of the biography? We don’t really need any knowledge of Napoleon, for instance, to find the Beethoven Sinfonia eroica a great piece.

So what I find yet more extraordinary about Hartmann, is how he strove with this very aspect of his self-awareness. In a talk at Boston’s Goethe-Institute, Munich professor Franzpeter Messmer described the composer’s restless revision of his symphonies thus: Hartmann did not want to be known only as the composer who had resisted Hitler.

Originally, the third (and final) movement of the Symphony No. 4 was a setting for soprano, accompanied by strings, of Epitaph for a Warrior by Kong-Fu-Tse [Confucius] in German translation. After the war, Hartmann felt that the poem bound the Symphony to the struggle, to the era of the struggle - a struggle, whose memory at the last, would necessarily fade. To free the Symphony from Time, we might almost say, Hartmann abandoned this setting, and wrote a completely new third movement; and yet, a new movement with convincing affinities with the first movement, an artistically satisfying balance all the more remarkable for its being a new creation grafted onto a work which had originally been designed more than ten years earlier.

I cannot hazard any guess on the eventual status to which Hartmann will gravitate as his work becomes better known, and is at last assimilated into the repertory. But Metzmacher and the BSO made a beautiful music with the Symphony No. 4, and it is a work which deserves wider recognition. It may well be that Hartmann’s star, at last, is in ascendancy. And if so, it will be remembered that it was Ingo Metzmacher whose sextant was trained so steadfastly upon the Hartmann star.