Has there ever been an attempt to estimate what Mozart's income would have been if he had lived in our materialistic age, one in which a composer of popular musicals could auction a small part of his wine cellar for several million pounds?
Mozart was paid a pittance by his imperial and clerical employers. His deep faith did not seem to have prevented him from expressing contempt in many of his letters for the bigoted "bloated" clerics who treated him like a recalcitrant servant.
One of the reasons why I taught myself German was to be able to read his letters.
Having been a dedicated amateur musician all my life, I increasingly feel that it is Mozart who formed many of my aesthetic values and taught me in purely musical terms what faith in compassion means.
Friday, 28 January 2011
Thursday, 27 January 2011
The Art of Creative Listening
I’m well into my 98th year, but through some genetic grace enjoying physical and mental fitness and alertness.
I was a student of the great Leo Weiner in chamber music, (in the same class as Sir Georg Solti), and although a strictly amateur cellist, I was able to - and I did - perform with professional musicians in most of the late Beethoven string quartets up to a few months ago.
Unhappily, severe arthritic deformation in my fingers put an end to my cello-playing and, after some 90 years of virtually daily practice, this has left a big black hole in my life.
Although for almost three years now I have been a music critic, accredited to the superb Festspielhaus in Baden Baden (one of Europe’s largest opera and concert halls), writing for MusicalCriticism.com, I had to look for compensation for my virtually daily cello-playing. (My articles and reviews can be seen here.)
I spend many hours listening to my classical CDs and DVDs and having also played in my student days under most of the great maestros of the twenties and thirties, I was always familiar with, and fascinated by, the technique of conducting.
I have now started “CO-CONDUCTING” opera performances, symphony concerts, and even chamber music, solo works and lieder, and I believe that I have discovered an entirely new “ART OF CREATIVE LISTENING”.
Age old taboos force a concert or opera audience to sit rigidly throughout even the longest performances and the tightness of the seating accommodation imposes further restraints. It is only when allowed to applaud that this unnatural physical and mental posture can be relieved.
Like Pavlovian dogs, we are tuned to respect this taboo, even when we are listening to music in privacy.
In a live performance we rely on the body language of the performer to interpret for us what we are prevented by our taboos bodily to express ourselves. We are compelled to watch and concentrate motionlessly and passively.
I found that, when liberated from the constraints imposed on me in a concert hall, in my privacy I can give passionate bodily expression, at least similar to the performer’s or conductor’s interpretation, through “co-conducting”, and this with a baton.
I happen to be familiar with conducting techniques, but any music lover could express these genetically imprinted urges to respond to music with bodily reactions to its rhythm, logic, emotional and intellectual content, without having to handle a baton with professional competence.
A baton seems to defy even gravity, and has its own sensitive life, responding to the most subtle and subconscious pressures, like a water-diviner’s two-pronged dousing device. The baton, almost acting on its own, determines the pulse and separates the bars, throwing a clear light on the structure of the composition. You are almost forcibly identified with the performer, and, curiously, even with eyes closed, one can virtually visualise the entire orchestra to the extent of being able to give spacially correct cues to sections or soloists.
This intense identification with the performers and the feeling that one is really in charge of the performance is perhaps the most striking feature of this experience
I “did” recently the Ring transmitted from Bayreuth, two Meistersingers, Il Trovatore, Tales of Hoffmann, Rigoletto, Don Carlo, Ernani and most of the superb BBC Prom concerts, with, amongst many other works, Mahler 1, 3, 4 and 5, Brahms 1, 3 and 4 and an unforgettable Mahler 9th under Abbado, and it was not only an exercise idly waving my arms...
With a baton in hand I came to rely on this inner sensitivity to revive a truly enormous richness of memories that now enables me to give to myself parallel performances, as it were, of an almost unlimited repertory, always assisted by superb interpretations, which I replicate, almost performing myself. I have also found that I can cope with “co-conducting” works that are new to me, just relying on the powerful inner logic imparted by the use of a baton.
“Co-conducting” is an emotional and intellectual challenge, and, importantly, a major physical effort, possibly no less powerful in intensity than real live performances.
Elementary “co-conducting” may offer a significant assistance to therapeutical measures treating Alzheimer and Dementia sufferers. Recent research shows that musical memories are the ones that best resist the ravages inflicted by the dying of brain cells. I imagine that “co-conducting” for patients in group therapy would be an enjoyable pastime that also could increase the remnants of self respect and confidence.
If you get yourself a baton, you may be persuaded that I have opened a new window on “creative listening”. Presenters introducing recorded music or transmitting live performances may suggest to listeners to try this form of “creative listening”. Acquiring a baton is the first step in this experience.
I was a student of the great Leo Weiner in chamber music, (in the same class as Sir Georg Solti), and although a strictly amateur cellist, I was able to - and I did - perform with professional musicians in most of the late Beethoven string quartets up to a few months ago.
Unhappily, severe arthritic deformation in my fingers put an end to my cello-playing and, after some 90 years of virtually daily practice, this has left a big black hole in my life.
Although for almost three years now I have been a music critic, accredited to the superb Festspielhaus in Baden Baden (one of Europe’s largest opera and concert halls), writing for MusicalCriticism.com, I had to look for compensation for my virtually daily cello-playing. (My articles and reviews can be seen here.)
I spend many hours listening to my classical CDs and DVDs and having also played in my student days under most of the great maestros of the twenties and thirties, I was always familiar with, and fascinated by, the technique of conducting.
I have now started “CO-CONDUCTING” opera performances, symphony concerts, and even chamber music, solo works and lieder, and I believe that I have discovered an entirely new “ART OF CREATIVE LISTENING”.
Age old taboos force a concert or opera audience to sit rigidly throughout even the longest performances and the tightness of the seating accommodation imposes further restraints. It is only when allowed to applaud that this unnatural physical and mental posture can be relieved.
Like Pavlovian dogs, we are tuned to respect this taboo, even when we are listening to music in privacy.
In a live performance we rely on the body language of the performer to interpret for us what we are prevented by our taboos bodily to express ourselves. We are compelled to watch and concentrate motionlessly and passively.
I found that, when liberated from the constraints imposed on me in a concert hall, in my privacy I can give passionate bodily expression, at least similar to the performer’s or conductor’s interpretation, through “co-conducting”, and this with a baton.
I happen to be familiar with conducting techniques, but any music lover could express these genetically imprinted urges to respond to music with bodily reactions to its rhythm, logic, emotional and intellectual content, without having to handle a baton with professional competence.
A baton seems to defy even gravity, and has its own sensitive life, responding to the most subtle and subconscious pressures, like a water-diviner’s two-pronged dousing device. The baton, almost acting on its own, determines the pulse and separates the bars, throwing a clear light on the structure of the composition. You are almost forcibly identified with the performer, and, curiously, even with eyes closed, one can virtually visualise the entire orchestra to the extent of being able to give spacially correct cues to sections or soloists.
This intense identification with the performers and the feeling that one is really in charge of the performance is perhaps the most striking feature of this experience
I “did” recently the Ring transmitted from Bayreuth, two Meistersingers, Il Trovatore, Tales of Hoffmann, Rigoletto, Don Carlo, Ernani and most of the superb BBC Prom concerts, with, amongst many other works, Mahler 1, 3, 4 and 5, Brahms 1, 3 and 4 and an unforgettable Mahler 9th under Abbado, and it was not only an exercise idly waving my arms...
With a baton in hand I came to rely on this inner sensitivity to revive a truly enormous richness of memories that now enables me to give to myself parallel performances, as it were, of an almost unlimited repertory, always assisted by superb interpretations, which I replicate, almost performing myself. I have also found that I can cope with “co-conducting” works that are new to me, just relying on the powerful inner logic imparted by the use of a baton.
“Co-conducting” is an emotional and intellectual challenge, and, importantly, a major physical effort, possibly no less powerful in intensity than real live performances.
Elementary “co-conducting” may offer a significant assistance to therapeutical measures treating Alzheimer and Dementia sufferers. Recent research shows that musical memories are the ones that best resist the ravages inflicted by the dying of brain cells. I imagine that “co-conducting” for patients in group therapy would be an enjoyable pastime that also could increase the remnants of self respect and confidence.
If you get yourself a baton, you may be persuaded that I have opened a new window on “creative listening”. Presenters introducing recorded music or transmitting live performances may suggest to listeners to try this form of “creative listening”. Acquiring a baton is the first step in this experience.
Wednesday, 26 January 2011
The Grace of Dying Early
A German Chancellor coined a phrase that became one of the most effective quotes in Germany to show that the generations born after the Nazi tragedy cannot bear the responsibility for its deeds:
DIE GNADE DER SPAETEN GEBURT = THE GRACE OF BEING BORN LATE.
I have turned it round to show how fate was kind to those who died too early to have suffered the calvary prepared for them.
I conceived a potential script for a TV or film feature to which I gave the title: “The Grace of Dying Early”.
In a nutshell, the idea was to show a doctor, who in 1938, when antisemitism in Hungary was not yet at the bestial state it reached in 1944, suffers a heart attack, but is revived by the ambulance crew. He recovers and is well enough to, with his wife, accompany his son, who, through devious ways has managed to obtain a visa to leave the country at a time when still so few thought of doing so, to the railway station to say goodbye.
In the course of the next few years the doctor and his wife suffer the fate of the tormented and abused Jewish population in Budapest, until Eichmann reaches the scene in the spring of 1944 and with the enthusiastic approbation of a good part of the population, deports 460,000 Jews to Auschwitz. The Jews of Budapest are given a respite by Horthy being pressurized by the Western Powers not to allow their wholesale deportation, and are herded into ghettoes.
It is then that my good doctor is denounced for some trivial reason and is deported to Treblinka. Immediately on arrival, like all the other deportees, he is driven naked through a narrow passage in the forest, quite near the railway station, and murdered by an extermination squad.
The shot that is to kill the doctor is amplified into a cataclysmic explosion, and the screen goes blank, only to revert to the scene, where the ambulance arrived in 1939 and he was revived after his heart attack.
An alternative version:
The son, returning to Budapest after many decades spent abroad, visits the memorial at the corner of the Parliament, the place where Jews dragged out of the ghettoes in the bitter winter of 1944 had to undress, and were shot, tied together in groups of three and dumped into the Danube.
While brooding over these terrible events, the story of his father emerges in his recollections of those terrible events.
Amongst the victims is the Father and the shot that hits him is magnfied into a cataclysmic explosion that sets the clock back to the time of his heart attack in 1938. This time, the efforts to revive him fail, and the doctor dies in peace, spared the suffering he would have had to endure if he had survived.
So in the closing scene, instead of the Father and Mother taking their leave of their son at the railway station, only the doubly grieving Mother waves as the red lights at the end of the train disappear into the gloom.
I cannot help thinking that this could be the basis of a script - unusual and having a very meaningful title, so far not exploited.
I was in fact the son who survived (my brother did too, but that’s another story). The details of my escape from Hungary and my subsequent induction into the British services and the S.O.E. could be intertwined with the suffering of the good doctor. Both stories are potentially interesting even now, even so many years after the events.
By the way, the reason the doctor was denounced is that he kept a secret radio in the Ghetto. My screenplay shows him recognizing the voice of his son, broadcasting from Italy as an S.O.E. agent, using the phrase he said to his mother at the railway station: “I will return when roses in Hungary grow without thorns”. As that same phrase crackles through radio the doctor immediately recognizes the identity of the speaker. He later excitedly tells others in the ghetto about this, but someone betrays him, the Nazis find the hidden radio in his room, and his doom is sealed.
DIE GNADE DER SPAETEN GEBURT = THE GRACE OF BEING BORN LATE.
I have turned it round to show how fate was kind to those who died too early to have suffered the calvary prepared for them.
I conceived a potential script for a TV or film feature to which I gave the title: “The Grace of Dying Early”.
In a nutshell, the idea was to show a doctor, who in 1938, when antisemitism in Hungary was not yet at the bestial state it reached in 1944, suffers a heart attack, but is revived by the ambulance crew. He recovers and is well enough to, with his wife, accompany his son, who, through devious ways has managed to obtain a visa to leave the country at a time when still so few thought of doing so, to the railway station to say goodbye.
In the course of the next few years the doctor and his wife suffer the fate of the tormented and abused Jewish population in Budapest, until Eichmann reaches the scene in the spring of 1944 and with the enthusiastic approbation of a good part of the population, deports 460,000 Jews to Auschwitz. The Jews of Budapest are given a respite by Horthy being pressurized by the Western Powers not to allow their wholesale deportation, and are herded into ghettoes.
It is then that my good doctor is denounced for some trivial reason and is deported to Treblinka. Immediately on arrival, like all the other deportees, he is driven naked through a narrow passage in the forest, quite near the railway station, and murdered by an extermination squad.
The shot that is to kill the doctor is amplified into a cataclysmic explosion, and the screen goes blank, only to revert to the scene, where the ambulance arrived in 1939 and he was revived after his heart attack.
An alternative version:
The son, returning to Budapest after many decades spent abroad, visits the memorial at the corner of the Parliament, the place where Jews dragged out of the ghettoes in the bitter winter of 1944 had to undress, and were shot, tied together in groups of three and dumped into the Danube.
While brooding over these terrible events, the story of his father emerges in his recollections of those terrible events.
Amongst the victims is the Father and the shot that hits him is magnfied into a cataclysmic explosion that sets the clock back to the time of his heart attack in 1938. This time, the efforts to revive him fail, and the doctor dies in peace, spared the suffering he would have had to endure if he had survived.
So in the closing scene, instead of the Father and Mother taking their leave of their son at the railway station, only the doubly grieving Mother waves as the red lights at the end of the train disappear into the gloom.
I cannot help thinking that this could be the basis of a script - unusual and having a very meaningful title, so far not exploited.
I was in fact the son who survived (my brother did too, but that’s another story). The details of my escape from Hungary and my subsequent induction into the British services and the S.O.E. could be intertwined with the suffering of the good doctor. Both stories are potentially interesting even now, even so many years after the events.
By the way, the reason the doctor was denounced is that he kept a secret radio in the Ghetto. My screenplay shows him recognizing the voice of his son, broadcasting from Italy as an S.O.E. agent, using the phrase he said to his mother at the railway station: “I will return when roses in Hungary grow without thorns”. As that same phrase crackles through radio the doctor immediately recognizes the identity of the speaker. He later excitedly tells others in the ghetto about this, but someone betrays him, the Nazis find the hidden radio in his room, and his doom is sealed.
Thursday, 20 January 2011
Hungary: a Janus-faced country
I'm well into my 98th year. I left the country of my birth, Hungary, just before the Second World war, because, like Bela Bartok, I felt that the - then only still mildly reactionary policies of Goemboes and the indecision of Horthy in accepting advice from Bethlen, would drive the country into tragedy. It was driven and the word tragedy is insufficient to describe the depths to which the country sank during the forties...
After the war, Hungary experienced the most vicious pseudo-communist dictatorship and, after its lethargic demise, another corrupt and incompetent "pseudo-social democratic" regime, with four years of "Orban-ery", which was also so incompetent that even "Gyurcsany-ism" could twice defeat it in free and fair elections.
Now, after another free and fair election, Orban has returned, this time with powers that inevitably will repeat the fatal indecision of the last Horthy years. Even after a few months he already shows shades of autocracy, like some Heads of nominally "democratic" states further East. He will profess to clear up the Augian Stable he inherited, but for all his considerable intellectual and charismatic gifts, by giving himself absolute power to run the country single-handed, and also by not resolutely distancing himself from the extreme rightwing vote that helped him to power, he will recreate the Goemboes era, with its reliance on the fatuous belief that the disaster of Trianon can be assuaged by jingoistic, chauvinistic sloganizing, a return to a personality cult based on the adoration of Horthy and so-called "Christian virtues", and the pretended uniqueness of the country, supposedly superior to all its neighbours.
Hungary will remain a nominally parliamentary democracy.
In the meantime, tourists with dollars and Euros will continue to flock to Hungary and enjoy the beauty of Budapest, the healing waters of Heviz, the smart coffee shops and many other delights. Behind the majestic boulevards, FIDESZ voters will continue to need two jobs to survive, and the age-old Hungarian disease of looking for scapegoats to hate will fester at an ever increasing pace. The few Jews left after 460,000 of them had been shipped to Auschwitz by their compatriots in 1944, the Roma, liberalism, and European cosmopolitism will serve well as ammunition.
I still love the memory of my happy childhood, my education, my artistic development at the Liszt Ferencz Music Academy, the smells and tastes of the food, the brilliance of the art, music, literature and science, and the beauty of the language and landscape. Yet, apart from occasional bouts of homesickness, I am relieved never having to see again the brutal cock-feathered Gendarmery, or read the vicious antisemitic outbursts of a Bayer Zsolt under the cloak of journalism - the publication of which now seems to be tolerated, or watch demonstrations on the Heroes' Square by large crowds greeting visiting SS veteran "brothers in arms".
There is still a brave, talented and progressive elite in Hungary,that hopefully will one day offer true statesmanship to that wonderful but Janus-faced country.
After the war, Hungary experienced the most vicious pseudo-communist dictatorship and, after its lethargic demise, another corrupt and incompetent "pseudo-social democratic" regime, with four years of "Orban-ery", which was also so incompetent that even "Gyurcsany-ism" could twice defeat it in free and fair elections.
Now, after another free and fair election, Orban has returned, this time with powers that inevitably will repeat the fatal indecision of the last Horthy years. Even after a few months he already shows shades of autocracy, like some Heads of nominally "democratic" states further East. He will profess to clear up the Augian Stable he inherited, but for all his considerable intellectual and charismatic gifts, by giving himself absolute power to run the country single-handed, and also by not resolutely distancing himself from the extreme rightwing vote that helped him to power, he will recreate the Goemboes era, with its reliance on the fatuous belief that the disaster of Trianon can be assuaged by jingoistic, chauvinistic sloganizing, a return to a personality cult based on the adoration of Horthy and so-called "Christian virtues", and the pretended uniqueness of the country, supposedly superior to all its neighbours.
Hungary will remain a nominally parliamentary democracy.
In the meantime, tourists with dollars and Euros will continue to flock to Hungary and enjoy the beauty of Budapest, the healing waters of Heviz, the smart coffee shops and many other delights. Behind the majestic boulevards, FIDESZ voters will continue to need two jobs to survive, and the age-old Hungarian disease of looking for scapegoats to hate will fester at an ever increasing pace. The few Jews left after 460,000 of them had been shipped to Auschwitz by their compatriots in 1944, the Roma, liberalism, and European cosmopolitism will serve well as ammunition.
I still love the memory of my happy childhood, my education, my artistic development at the Liszt Ferencz Music Academy, the smells and tastes of the food, the brilliance of the art, music, literature and science, and the beauty of the language and landscape. Yet, apart from occasional bouts of homesickness, I am relieved never having to see again the brutal cock-feathered Gendarmery, or read the vicious antisemitic outbursts of a Bayer Zsolt under the cloak of journalism - the publication of which now seems to be tolerated, or watch demonstrations on the Heroes' Square by large crowds greeting visiting SS veteran "brothers in arms".
There is still a brave, talented and progressive elite in Hungary,that hopefully will one day offer true statesmanship to that wonderful but Janus-faced country.
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