Schubert contracted syphilis in 1822 and would thereafter have been aware that he was not to live out a normal span. It is not difficult to discern in his music the presumed effects of this knowledge; Tom Service has even written an article about an 1824 piano work (D784) entitled “Schubert’s syphilitic sonata”. Once infected, he had to cope with severe pain and visible, socially embarrassing symptoms, though these were interspersed with periods of remission. In a famous letter to the painter Leopold Kupelwieser in March 1824, he describes himself as “a man whose health will never be right again” and who is “the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world”. Whilst it is generally undesirable to map biographical elements onto abstract music in the absence of external evidence, in Schubert’s case the evidence is to hand. There is moreover a directness of utterance, an absence of artifice or gesture in his music, which make him for many the most lovable of all composers. His genius is to draw us in to the melancholy of his interior world, and at the same time to set before us a vision of unattainable beauty, albeit one suffused with the ineffable sadness of transience.

One unmistakable feature of the composer’s late masterpieces makes it particularly affecting to think of him approaching an untimely end. It is sometimes thought that expressionism in music is the province of the 20th century. We associate with Gustav Mahler above all the psychological mood which is the aural equivalent of Munch’s Scream: the dissonant chord which forms the climax of the first movement in his tenth symphony is a powerful example of the composer staring into the abyss. But it was Schubert who, almost a century earlier, wrote the first music of existential terror. There is no such music in Beethoven, for all the vast range of his expression, and although the Dies Irae in Mozart’s Requiem vividly depicts the horrors of the Last Judgment, there is an objectivity and poise in the writing which makes any inference of the composer’s own state of mind from the music an Amadeus-style exercise in confected sentimentality. (The commendatore music in Don Giovanni may be a nearer case, but opera falls into a somewhat separate category.)

It is instructive to contrast the Requiem with Schubert’s own last religious work, the Mass D950 (June 1828). The Sanctus, which typically celebrates God’s holiness and majesty, is here a nightmare: Schubert’s music begins unexceptionably in E flat major, though the whispered piano is unusual, before building to a terrifying fortissimo outburst in the unforeseeable key of B minor. (A not dissimilar effect is to be found in the same movement of the Mass D678 from 1822). This is the music of dread, not of adoration. He also eschews the consolatory tone normally associated with an Agnus Dei in favour of a four-note cantus firmus whose implacable menace is clear, even without the knowledge that this is the same cell as provides the spare accompaniment in his subsequent ghost-song Der Doppelgänger. In German folklore, the encounter with one’s own double is a sign of imminent death; the D950 Mass communicates not so much the fear of that death as the premonition of a personal hell. As Graham Johnson has written, it is the vision of the “soul-searching syphilitic only too aware of the meaning of peccata mundi”. 

The ternary form is one of the commonest musical ground-plans. Its A-B-A layout looks back to the Middle Ages; it underlies the Baroque da capo aria, and has a distant cousinship with sonata-form. It is commonly encountered in the slow movement of a classical symphony, chamber work or sonata, as well as in songs of every period up to the present day. Of its essence is that the central episode provides contrast with the outer sections, and it is no surprise to find Schubert making full use of this form in his last instrumental works, as he had throughout his career. But what marks out several of these late pieces is the way in which the music of terror of which he was the pioneer pervades and disrupts their slow movements, even though much else in the works appears serene, confident or even boisterous. The A major piano sonata (D959) and the string quintet (D956) are exemplars, and the piano trio in E flat (D929) is a formally more complex case of the same phenomenon; but it is the sonata which stands at the extreme verge.

Schubert’s last three piano sonatas (D958-960) were completed in September 1828. Perhaps the most obvious allusion to death in general, if not to his own mortality, is the macabre Totentanz which is the unremitting tarantella finale of D958. Likewise, the bass trill that is never far below the surface in the seemingly unruffled first movement of D960 announces that “Even in Arcadia, I am present”. However, the andantino of D959 is on a different plane of alienation. It is all the more aberrant in a work which is generally so warm-hearted and affirmatory. Alfred Brendel writes of its “desolate grace behind which madness lies”. The movement begins with a barcarolle in F sharp minor; this was an uncommon key for Schubert, though he had used it in 1817 for an unfinished sonata, whose first movement is similar in mood if not metre to the andantino. A closer link is with his 1823 song Pilgerweise, also in F sharp minor, in which the poet Franz von Schober, Schubert’s closest friend, depicts a pilgrim who wanders from house to house, longing for love, but who is only able to repay in flowers the relief which people’s kindness affords him. Schober is traditionally blamed for having encouraged Schubert to consort with prostitutes, and thus for his illness. He may even have written this poem subsequent to his friend’s infection and as a sympathetic reflection of his mental condition.

In the opening section of the andantino, which recalls the first bars of Pilgerweise, there is a sense of music hypnotised, rooted to the harmonic spot. Nothing prepares us for what is to come after 68 bars of controlled monotony. Then it is as if the subtext of the Lied has burst into existence. The middle section begins with a meandering figuration which starts logically enough in the dominant key, C sharp minor, and ushers in some conventional diminished seventh arpeggios, but thereafter, like Lear’s, the composer’s wits begin to turn, and the listener too loses comprehension as the music stalks through C minor and E minor
before fragmenting into the most lurid and anarchic bars written in the 19th century. They need to be seen on the page, and cannot be conveyed in words. Schubert’s biographer Brian Newbould does his best, calling this middle section “the wildest outburst of fantasy Schubert ever committed to paper”, and referring to “its torrential scales, pulse-threatening rhythms, trills, shock harmonies, writhing chromaticism, fragments of recitative, dramatic silences and stabbed chords”. Jonathan Biss comes close to the mark in speaking of “a composed hallucination”, for it is precisely that transgressive unrealism which is so shattering. We live now in an age which congratulates itself on the fact that art has succeeded in dispensing with aesthetic boundaries; however we do not always recognise what an impoverishment such freedom brings with it. If there are no conventions, it is impossible to be unconventional. In the middle section of the andantino, Schubert flouts every compositional principle, every concert-goer’s expectation. No wonder that András Schiff has said that the piece’s “modernity is incredible even today”. It is in effect a nervous breakdown in music, all the more remarkable from a composer who was writing at the dawn of the Romantic era but whose idiom and language are still classical.

The episode culminates in a hysterical outburst of repeated fortissimo C sharp minor chords in the treble, at which point a hesitant figure in the tenor register seeks as it were to crawl away from the fury; but its attempts at shelter are interrupted by further vicious blows, and it is hard even for the most restrained imagination not to conjure up something akin to a punishment beating. The anger eventually exhausts itself, and the music finds its way to the wounded consolation of C sharp major, before the barcarolle is resumed. Heraclitus is reputed to have said that one cannot step into the same river twice. In the Schubert movements which contain these violent central episodes, aftershocks in the form of enhanced rhythmic complexity are threaded into the music of the resumed opening sections and heighten their intensity, as if the composer
is conveying that one cannot after such infernal visions hope to regain a wholly undisturbed mind.

It is hard to listen with actual pleasure to the nightmare music of the andantino, or even the equivalent, disturbing passage in the sublime string quintet. These are dark nights, to be endured and survived by the listener as much as by the composer. Fortunately, the music moves on, and although the shadows remain, something like brightness returns; the scherzo and finale of D959 are touching and luminous. Likewise, Schubert’s last song was not Doppelgänger, but Die Taubenpost, a tale not of a spurned lover haunting the street where his sweetheart once lived, but of a young man imagining his longing to be a carrier pigeon sent on a daily journey to his beloved. Yet there is no facile symmetry between these stories, any more than exists between the contrasting elements in the composer’s bipolar mind. Schubert claimed not to know of such a thing as happy music, and especially in his last works the the transcendent sorrow, which for ephemeral creatures must underlie all joys, is never absent. This is the reason why music-lovers cherish Schubert so deeply—not for the blackness of one side of his nature, but for the poignancy which underlies the cheerfulness of the other.

Thus, despite the lover’s hopefulness in Taubenpost, we sense with tender concern that his ardour will ultimately be unreciprocated, and the lines of his contemporary come to mind: “Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,/Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;/She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,/For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” How we realise that all will not go well for the protagonist is a mystery but, as Johnson writes, it is thus that Schubert “engages our pity without asking for it; and the radiance of the music draws us even closer to the hidden suffering”. His last song is our possession for ever, the lover’s pining preserved like the image on the Grecian urn. The half-light of the composer’s delight in life is not comprehended by the darkness in which it shines. Finally we come to realise that the very fact of Schubert’s wretchedly premature death forms part of his measureless bequest, of which Alfred Einstein truly wrote that “the feeling he inspires in later ages is an infinite longing for a lost paradise of purity, spontaneity and innocence”. 

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As well as being one of the longest, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is one of the sanest operas ever composed. This may seem a curious choice of adjective to describe any production of the frequently paranoid mind of Richard Wagner, but it fits. As is well known, the Ring project had become temporarily stranded in 1857 on the shoals of his probably unconsummated love affair with Mathilde von Wesendonck. He was thus in no mental condition to create the music for the blazing encounter between Siegfried and Brünnhilde, the point which he had reached in the libretto already written. The imminent consummation with which Siegfried ends would have to wait for another 12 years, when Wagner’s emotional rescue at the hands of Cosima von Bülow was completed by her presentation to him of a son, inevitably christened Siegfried.

Wagner turned instead to the composition of Tristan und Isolde. This project, exploring in musical terms the lineaments of unfulfillable desire, led him into depths which made it even harder for him to imagine the bright affirmation of requited love. Some form of therapy was required, and Wagner characteristically administered it to himself. Robert Gutman believes that the aesthetic crisis of Tristan resolved in Meistersinger was essentially musical: “a strong dose of diatonism restored a patient weakened by chromatic fever.” Yet the music of Meistersinger is not as far from Tristan as is sometimes supposed: even in the prelude to act 1 of the later work, one can hear figurations similar to those which accompany Isolde’s Liebestod. It is rather in the subject-matter of Meistersinger that Wagner took up a new and curative direction, embracing—for the only time in his mature work—exclusively human pre-occupations. Having dogmatically assured his disciples in his theoretical writings that myth alone could provide themes worthy of the German stage, Wagner located Meistersinger in real time, in an identifiable place with historical characters.

The opera pays homage both to the traditions of 16th-century Nuremberg and also to the contrapuntalism of Bach. Indeed, the glory of Meistersinger is its music. From the moment when the prelude begins with a richly upholstered falling fourth—the solid interval which encapsulates the middle-class virtues of the mastersingers—one feels a sense of well-being. There is exceptional ripeness and beauty in the score, whether in the lyricism of the aristocratic Walther von Stolzing’s new music, the delicate evocation of a mid-summer evening, Hans Sachs’ soliloquy as he contemplates with melancholy events past and to come, or the chorale sung in his honour at the prize ceremony. The work directs affectionate fun at the parochial pre-occupations of people who live ordinary lives, whilst at the same time conducting an elevated aesthetic debate about artistic values, and continuing in a more muted register than in Tristan the composer’s meditation on Schopenhauer’s ethic of renunciation. Sunny and life-affirming, it is for many Wagnerians their favourite of his music dramas. 

Unfortunately, its admirers included Hitler. This fact (though most senior Nazis could not stand Wagner’s work), combined with the growth in Holocaust studies in the last 50 years, has put Meistersinger under the critical microscope. Two particular, connected points are highlighted in this context: Sachs’s closing paean to “holy German art” and, more serious yet, the supposedly antisemitic elements in the character of Sixtus Beckmesser. Both of these issues, especially the latter, have recently spawned a vast, often passionate literature. To those who know the opera but who are unfamiliar with this controversy, it may come as a surprise. It would be difficult to find anything antisemitic in the work if one did not have prior knowledge of Wagner’s notorious views on the subject. Nor does such knowledge on its own reveal the shadow which is said to lie over the work: like his other creations, it is universal by design and intent, and most alert opera-goers will not discern any taint in the characterisation, plot or music. To gain further insight, if such it be, one needs to dip a toe into the reams of articles, papers and academic exchanges on the topic. Thereafter, it is hard to regain a prelapsarian innocence about this apparently most genial of compositions.   

The best sentence ever uttered on the composer’s hostility to the Jewish race was written by Bryan Magee: “The repulsive nature of Wagner’s antisemitism is not a licence to misrepresent it.” For Magee, the only question that matters when considering the works is whether they in some demonstrable sense contain antisemitic material. If they do not (as he concludes), we may quickly find ourselves in deep waters if we are over-fastidious about the opinions of their begetter. Confining ourselves to this particular defect, should we change the way in which we read Virginia Woolf, or listen to Chopin, or look at Degas? Luther’s scatological loathing of the Jews is more repellent even than Wagner’s antipathy, but are Germans for that reason to look askance at their foundational Bible? Antisemitism has come, for justified reasons, to be seen as a hatred in a class of its own, but it was not always thus. Odious as it is, unacted-on prejudice is not the worst possible human transgression. Is there some reason why we should eschew Caravaggio because he may have been a murderer? Must we audit the cast of a classic film before watching it, to ensure that we are not unconsciously polluted? If we are to learn anything from the regrettable eagerness of universities to dislodge Rhodes or “cancel” Hume, it is that people are a mixture of good and bad, and that if we judge everyone at their worst, “who shall ’scape whipping?”

One group of critics asserts that there is an absolute division between Wagner the man and Wagner the composer of operas and libretti. Typical of these is Dieter Borchmeyer:

To foist [Wagner’s] anti-Jewish ideology onto his artistic oeuvre was as remote from his field of interest as it was beneath him as an artist. There are no Jewish characters in his music dramas, still less any antisemitic tendencies. His hatred of the Jews was excluded from the inner sanctum of his artistic personality.

Magee and Roger Scruton are in this camp too. Magee points to Wagner’s explicit denial of the possibility of ever representing a Jew on stage, and to the fact that, in all his volumes of self-explanation, the composer (whose essay “Jewishness in Music” he published not once but twice, in 1850 and 1869) never gave a hint that he intended to represent any of his characters in such a light. Scruton pointedly relegates discussion of the topic in his books on the Ring and Parsifal to the introductions; for him, this is just not what the works are about.

In the other corner, there are some who express themselves in language so intemperate that it can scarcely be taken seriously by anyone who has attended a performance of Meistersinger. Hartmut Zelinsky has claimed that “the Jewish theme” was at bottom Wagner’s “only theme”; Marc Weiner that his operas are “documents of hatred”. Paul Lawrence Rose has managed to detect a “fundamental anti-Jewish message” underlying, of all works, Tristan. If it were shown that Meistersinger invited our complicity in antisemitism, this would necessarily temper our attitude to it. We would still enjoy its other life-enhancing features, since it is evident to all except the most closed minds that, even if the charge were made good, this is not the opera’s principal subject-matter. But is it made good? Are there moments in the piece—Beckmesser’s act 2 serenade to Eva or his failed rendition of the prize song in act 3—where we ought to wince, not merely at the character’s humiliation, but because Wagner is summoning up the ancient, totemic hatred?

The case against an innocent reading of Meistersinger has been most formidably put, in terms less outspoken than those quoted above, by Barry Millington. His thesis is a subtle one (too much so for musicologist Charles Rosen—the two of them took part in a vigorous joust in the New York Review of Books in 1993). He does not claim that Wagner intended Beckmesser to be understood as a Jewish caricature, but rather that his representation nonetheless incorporates unmistakable antisemitic characteristics. As such, antisemitism is “woven into the ideological fabric of the opera”. This metaphor, like most, obscures the real question at issue: what is there in the text, characters or music, if anything, which is antisemitic, and was the work or any part of it understood or intended to be understood in this spirit?

It is convenient to start at the end, with Sachs’s concluding admonition on keeping German art pure against foreign influences, though the Holy Roman Empire might one day dissolve. (The historical Sachs died in 1576.) Unless one asserts a priori that there is no crossover between Wagner’s essays and his operas, one has to accept the possibility that there are relevant links between the two. Here, one might naturally think that Sachs is inveighing against French contamination; as Magee says, this is what the text strongly implies. It is true that, contemporaneously with the composition of Meistersinger, Wagner was writing “What is German?”, an essay which deplored the invasion of German culture by “an utterly alien element”, namely the Jews, who offered “a repugnant caricature of the German spirit”. However, French cultural dominance is vilified in this essay too, and there are insufficient grounds for detecting anything sinister in Sachs’s warning, given that he refers to the dangers of foreign “rule” (Majestät)—an inapt term to use for Jews, and more properly applied to the nation whose leader had, as 19th-century audiences would remember, indeed rolled up the German Empire.

Most of Millington’s other contentions focus on Beckmesser himself. He identifies the “startling fact” that the antisemitic traits in the part were absent in the composer’s original 1845 sketch and only introduced in the early 1860s, subsequent to the obsessive campaign “initiated” in “Jewishness in Music”. This argument presupposes both that the features introduced are indeed antisemitic, which is the question at issue, and also implies that Wagner’s prejudice post-dates 1845, which seems unlikely, given that it was so inflamed by his disastrous Paris years which ended in 1842.   

Another point made by some on behalf of the prosecution (though actually disavowed by Millington) finds significance in the fact that Wagner originally named the character Hanslich, a petulant allusion to the part-Jewish critic Hanslick, who had offended Wagner by an unenthusiastic review of Lohengrin in 1858. By the time he republished “Jewishness” shortly after the 1868 premiere of Meistersinger, Wagner had in his sights a cabal of Jewish critics, and he expanded the essay in order to attack not just—as before—Jewish musicians (their inability to compose without being counterfeit or absurd) but now also the Jewish press, Hanslick in particular. (Hanslick had reviewed the new opera in wounding terms.) One of the roles assumed by Beckmesser is to criticise Walther’s first attempt at a song in conformity with the guild’s rules. Later, it is Beckmesser’s own musical efforts which are ridiculed. There is thus an echo of both of the principal targets of the revised essay in these aspects of the part. However, this argument not only begs the same question as before, but also depends on Wagner having known that Hanslick was Jewish when composing Meistersinger. There is no evidence of this. Indeed, Gutman, who detects antisemitism almost everywhere in Wagner (for example regarding Parsifal as a barely encoded proto-Nazi “moral collapse”), notably omits to identify Beckmesser as incorporating Jewish characteristics.

As regards Beckmesser’s personality more generally, Millington identifies a huge  range of negative properties all of which were apparently recognisable antisemitic signifiers for a 19th-century German audience. Thus, he is scheming, argumentative, untrustworthy, thieving, pedantic, self-defensive, socially ambitious. He conforms to the persona of the schlemiel, a Jewish stereotype who falsely believes that he is in control, and who may harbour unrealistic sexual ambitions. His hysterical behaviour alludes to a supposed tendency of Jews to neurasthenia. Even his “intense fury” is a pointer in the same direction. And just as Jews (according to Wagner) speak Yiddish as a repugnant caricature of pure German and can produce no true art, so Beckmesser mangles the words and cannot sing the music of the stolen prize song.

Even if one sets on one side the independent derivation of several aspects of Beckmesser from the stock dottore of the commedia dell’ arte, there is a tendency to false logic in this argument. Unless, like Adorno, one starts from the question-begging premise that “All the rejects of Wagner’s works are caricatures of Jews”, there is a danger in reasoning that because elements in contemporary society ascribed all sorts of negative properties to Jews, and because a given persona possesses some of those properties (difficult not to, given their number), it therefore follows that the character carries an antisemitic message. This is especially so with attributes as universal as anger or a desire to get on in society. If Beckmesser’s paranoid tendencies are a Jewish trope, what about Wagner’s? The fallacy here is that exposed by Gustav Freytag, who in 1869 lampooned Wagner’s poisonous essay by demonstrating that by its own lights Wagner was “the greatest Jew of them all”. How else to explain his “exaggerated nervous unrest”, his “delight in the unusual and the contrived”, his “experimenting frame of mind that seeks satisfaction in the grotesque”, and so forth? As for Beckmesser’s inability to make sense of Walther’s free-spirited art, this is common to all the mastersingers in act 1 except Sachs, and it is doubtful whether they would have acquitted themselves any better in performing Walther’s song in act 3. It is simply in the interests of advancing the comedy that Beckmesser is placed at the extreme end of the mastersingers’ failure to understand Walther’s music, not because he is an enciphered Jew.

Harry Kupfer has pointed out that Beckmesser is hardly an outsider like Alberich or Klingsor. He plays an integral part in the community; he is the town clerk and the highest police authority; he is a serious candidate to become Eva’s husband, and is favoured by her father. He therefore has prestige within the city, and his unrivalled knowledge of the mastersingers’ regulations has elevated him to the position of “marker”. As another commentator puts it, he is simply “the epitome of a kind of musician we all know who is clever, knowledgeable and exacting but at the deepest level uncomprehending, because unable to liberate himself from the past and from the rulebook, so that he never rises above the schoolmasterly.” He is a warning of what happens if theory becomes separated from inspiration.

It is true that in the sadistic dénouement of the opera, Beckmesser disappears among the crowd after his public failure, and thus the comedic conventions are denied: there is no reconciliation, no hope for amendment; a bitter taste is left in the mouth. But this is not a case, as Millingon argues, of Wagner creating a character so shallow, one-dimensional and without redeeming features that for once the composer “loses his sure dramatic touch”, still less are we witnessing the sublimated public execution imagined by Weiner. What, one may ask, is likeable about Malvolio, who has similar amatory pretensions and suffers an even crueller fate, in a play that also leaves us uneasy at its conclusion, and is not thought the less of for that reason? Moreover, we should expect Beckmesser, a subsidiary character compared with Sachs and Walther, to cede the stage to them at the end. Whatever one thinks of the contest between traditional bourgeois art and Walther’s radical recasting of it (Walther of course being Wagner in thin disguise), Beckmesser, like the other reactionary members of the guild, could have no part to play in its resolution.

Millington’s argument then turns to the music. His key point here is that Beckmesser’s serenade is a deliberate parody of the Jewish cantorial style. He concedes that this allegation is “surprising” at first blush, but says that this is the only way to explain the “disjointed rhythms and seemingly endless melismata”, the frequent disruption of the rhythmic flow, the antiphony between singer and accompaniment, all of which imitate a synagogue chant. Millington raises the reader’s eyebrows further by pointing to the high tessitura of Beckmesser’s part, and argues that the intended screeching delivery of certain passages makes “subliminal suggestions [that] having undergone ritual circumcision, Beckmesser has been symbolically castrated [and that] he is likewise impotent as an artist”. 

Many commentators just cannot hear the basic correspondence which Millington detects, to say nothing of his far-fetched and anatomically confused extrapolation. In Egon Voss’s view, the serenade is simply intended to satirise Italian coloratura style. Its laughable chains of fourths surely symbolise a dry over-attention to the mastersingers’ compositional rules. Moreover, it is unclear whether Wagner was sufficiently familiar with Jewish liturgical music to be able to parody it. It is true that in “Jewishness” he wrote:

Who has not been convinced that the musical divine service in a popular synagogue is a mere caricature? Who has not had feelings of repulsion, horror and amusement on hearing that nonsensical gurgling, yodelling and cackling which no attempt at caricature can render more absurd than it is?

Of course, different people hear different things in a piece of music, and if one sets out with this quotation in mind to look for nonsensical yodelling in what may simply be a depiction of absurdity, one may find it. To sufficiently attuned antennae, no doubt even Alberich’s falling semitone may sound antisemitic.

Millington’s next point, however, is one which even some of those unsympathetic to his thesis find harder to dismiss. Originally identified by Adorno, it concerns the Grimm brothers’ fairy tale of the Jew in the thorn bush, who at one point in the story listens to a song bird and, being Jewish, desires to possess it. This appalling story not only parallels in its mise-en-scène certain aspects of the opera, but more “clinching” still, arguably finds its way into the text: Walther makes two seemingly gratuitous references to a thorn bush as he clashes with Beckmesser in act 1. In one of these, he sings of how “In a thorn-hedge, consumed with jealousy and grief, winter, grimly armed, had to hide himself away: with dry leaves rustling about him he lies in wait and plans how he might harm this joyful singing.” The German word grimmbewehrt—“grimly armed”—is a homonym for “authenticated by Grimm” (Grimmbewährt), and (says Millington) “no one familiar with Wagner’s literary style can seriously suggest that the pun is a coincidence”.

In Hans Rudolf Vaget’s balanced essay “The Beckmesser Controversy Revisited”, he concludes that “it is a mistake to distil from the polyvalent and equivocal language of the music dramas a message as narrow and simplistic as the hatred of Jews”. However, in relation to this point, he concedes the existence of a “strong intertextual link” and argues instead that Millington has exaggerated the degree of Wagner’s conscious intent. Thomas Grey finds “the allusion too tenuous to suppose that Wagner could have expected his audience to register it”. This is not the same as denying the connection altogether, but on either view the esoteric Grimm reference falls short of imparting to the opera itself a discernibly antisemitic quality. As Rosen sarcastically says, Wagner did not make his intentions clear, “and he is indebted to Millington, who came along at last to help him succeed”.

Finally, Millington raises the possibility that audiences at early performances of Meistersinger in Vienna and Berlin may have been alive to the antisemitic aspects which it contained. Cosima Wagner’s March 1870 diary refers to “the J[ews] spreading a story around that “Beckmesser’s song” is an old Jewish song which R. was trying to ridicule. In consequence, some hissing in the second act.” Cosima, who was at least as virulent an antisemite as her husband, ascribed this reaction to Jewish elements in the audience. This is a somewhat equivocal clue; Millington refers to it as “tantalising”. The truth is complicated, for by now Wagner’s antisemitism was famous (all the more so after the re-publication of “Jewishness”) and was the focus of various parodies of Meistersinger which appeared soon after its first performances. The first of these featured four Jewish composers (including “Felix Mandelbaum”) who mock the Wagner/Walther figure (“Richard von Wahnsing”); far from being Jewish, Beckmesser appears as an Italian musician (called Werda) who is costumed as a troubadour and sings a ditty to the tune of “La donna è mobile”. In later parodies, Beckmesser’s role is to expose Walther himself as a Jew, revealed in one case to be Walther Isidor Goldzink of Goldzink & Son, suppliers of goose fat. The public’s perception of Wagner and his ludicrous opinions was therefore multi-faceted; and there is no clear indication that early audiences picked up on what was at most a private sub-text, rather than an overt portrayal.

None of these arguments perhaps clinches the case for either side, but the burden is on those who seek to persuade us that
Meistersinger has darker elements than originally thought. They have not succeeded. Moreover, perhaps the most telling point in the whole debate is that if, as Millington says, Beckmesser’s characterisation conformed to “a common stock of antisemitic stereotypes”, it is striking that there is no record of Nazis, many of whom venerated and paid the greatest attention to Meistersinger, having ever detected the allusion. David Dennis has trawled the sources exhaustively and, while he grants that one cannot plumb Wagner’s innermost intentions, he directly challenges the Millington thesis, concluding that there is “no evidence that Nazi cultural politicians or their volkish forbears and associates referred to Beckmesser as Jewish”, despite “having no reservations about antisemitic diatribes within their treatments of Wagner”. This dimension of Meistersinger just formed no part of their cultural vocabulary.

Four concluding remarks may be made. First, the case that Meistersinger actually contains antisemitism (whether intentionally or otherwise) is not made out, and indeed Millington does not really advance it. Those who love this warm-hearted opera can therefore listen to it with a clear conscience after all. Secondly, the well-springs of a composer’s inspiration are complex and unfathomable, and it is always hard to prove a negative. Millington’s claim that antisemitism inspired aspects of the opera may at some level be justified (and even Rosen acknowledges a grain of truth in the argument), but it does not rise to the surface, and Millington therefore exaggerates in characterising the opera as “richly problematical”. Thirdly, what matters in the end about Wagner is the music which he composed. Had it not been for this, he would not have impinged on the consciousness of subsequent generations to the vast extent that he has. Ernst Bloch was right to say that “the music of the Nazis is not the prelude to Meister-singer, but rather the Horst-Wessel-Lied; they deserve credit for nothing else, and no more can or should be given to them”.

Lastly, and even if these conclusions are rejected, it is salutary to remember what Magee rightly calls “the most moving expression from a Jew of . . . the right way of looking at these things”. This was Abraham Sabor, who lent Wagner money and was not repaid:

I have given him a lot of money. He hardly said thank you. I told him I couldn’t help being a Jew, and he called me Shylock. You see, my friends, the world is full of people who borrow and don’t repay; and steal other men’s wives, daughters and sweethearts. But only one of them wrote Tristan and Isolde . . . I only hope my children and their children will not listen to me when old age may make me bitter, but will listen to his music.   

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One of the earlier instances of the form, and less well-known than the three cases cited above, is the cantata (BWV198) composed in 1727 by Johann Sebastian Bach, on the death of Christiane Eberhardine, the wife of Augustus II the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. The great majority of Bach’s cantatas are purely religious works, composed for particular days in the church calendar, but secular interlopers occasionally occur, such as the so-called Coffee cantata and the Peasant cantata. Of greater stature than these appealing pieces is the Trauer-Ode (literally mourning ode) composed for Augustus’ consort. It is exceptional, even by the standards of Bach’s mature cantatas.

The city of Dresden must constitute, in more mobile times at least, the ideal long weekend destination. Notorious for one of the worst delinquencies committed by the Allies in the 1939-45 war, it has been impeccably restored so as to convey a vivid impression of the golden era which it enjoyed in the early 18th century under Augustus’s rule. What the rulers of Saxony lacked in military muscle, they made up for in extravagant display. According to the verdict of the peripatetic Baron Pöllnitz in 1729, it was “the most dazzling court in Europe”. Tim Blanning, biographer of Frederick the Great, reminds us that Augustus’s famous ambition to make Dresden the Venice of the north is illustrated by the way in which the dome of the Frauenkirche echoes that of Santa Maria della Salute on the Grand Canal, and by the visual record of the German city created by Bellotto, which mirrors and perhaps surpasses the more famous Venetian views of his uncle Antonio Canaletto. Simon Winder, in his entertaining book Germania, grants that Augustus made Dresden into a great centre of patronage and courtly life, but—for all the palaces and churches, the largest opera house north of the Alps, a premier division picture collection, and an astonishing hoard of gems and precious objects in the so-called Green Vault (recently depleted by a daring theft)—he concludes that the results were ultimately ruinous. “He embroiled Poland in disastrous wars, frittered his money away on bits of amber and ivory, fathered over 300 children, did a party piece involving tearing apart a horseshoe with his bare hands, and left Saxony helpless and indebted to an eye-watering degree.” In the later 18th century, under his son, the unpromisingly-nicknamed Augustus III the Fat, Saxony was no match for the expanding Prussia.

Christiane Eberhardine had enjoyed universal veneration in Protestant Saxony (the very seat of the German Reformation) for having not joined in her husband’s cynical conversion to Catholicism, undertaken (in the spirit of the Henri IV of France) in order to acquire the Polish crown. On her death, a Leipzig student, Carl von Kirchbach, sought permission for a mourning ode in her praise to be performed in that city’s university church, the Paulinerkirche, with music by Bach. Bach had lived in Leipzig since 1723, working as Cantor at the Thomaskirche, but the university wanted the music to be composed by its own music director Johann Gottlieb Görner. Fortunately, Kirchbach was adamant that it must be Bach, but one consequence, which Alfred Dürr calls “both shameful and amusing”, was that Bach was asked to sign a declaration stating that the commission would not set a precedent for Görner’s rights to be abused in the future. No doubt they were not, but Bach did not sign.

The text of the ode, by Johann Christoph Gottsched, is fairly described by John Eliot Gardiner as “an insipid pot-pourri of banalities, mawkish sentiments and bathetic rhymes”. For example, the performers are asked to sing: “Your Saxony, your dismayed Meißen/grow numb at your royal tomb;/ the eye weeps, the tongue cries:/My grief can be called indescribable! . . . Your Torgau wears mourning dress,/your Pretzsch grows weak, stiff and dull.” There is much more of the same—no fewer than nine eight-line stanzas—but as is so often the way, Bach’s music (the ten movements of which sensibly ignore, indeed savage the text’s strophic scheme) transforms a feeble literary effort into something dignified, atmospheric and profoundly moving.

It is sometimes said that the major mode is used by composers to convey happy music and the minor sad. This is usually an oversimplification and often simply untrue. Schubert typically slips into the major to heighten the sense of pathos; in Winterreise, for example, this is its principal function. Conversely, Bach often writes in minor keys to evoke a mood of vigorous intellectual activity, as in the preludes to the second or third English keyboard suites; and no one could misunderstand the jesting quality of the celebrated badinerie which concludes the second (B minor) orchestral suite. Yet Bach also used the minor mode to compose music of the deepest sorrow. The second partita in C minor offers both: it begins with an architectonic grave adagio which is like a funeral monument, but ends with an infectious capriccio (still in the same key), whose leaping tenths encourage the listener to get up and dance.

Nowhere did Bach (or anyone else) explore the mourning qualities inherent in the minor more completely or effectively than in his Passion music. In the first movement of the cantata for Christiane (“Laß, Fürstin, laß noch einen Strahl”), we are in the same sound-world as the opening chorus of the St Matthew Passion, a work which also dates from 1727. This is due partly to the rich orchestration; partly to the delayed entry of the choir, and to the way in which its drooping or sinuous lines are punctuated by plangent commentaries on the flutes and oboes d’amore. The vivid pictorialism of the larger work is also echoed in the remarkable fourth movement of the cantata (“Der Glocken bebendes Getön”), in which woodwind and plucked strings (including a pair of lutes) evoke differently-sized funeral bells, from the flutes in the treble to the sonorous tolling of the violas da gamba.

Gardiner reserves especial praise for the “astonishing” harmonic as well as aural effects achieved in just 11 bars, which is all that this recitativo comprises. The gamba or wind scoring of the cantata’s arias is no less delicate, and recalls the technique in the Passion of highlighting a particular instrumental coloration in each movement. (A contemporary account mentions that the cantata required recorders as well, though Bach scholar and ragtime champion Joshua Rifkin thinks that this may have been a mistake.) And just as the Matthew Passion ends with a slow sarabande, so the cantata closes with a curious fusion of dance form and threnody, albeit in a less massive and inconsolable register than in the larger work. It should be no surprise to anyone who is acquainted with this music—a fact which stands as an index of its quality—that Bach later redeployed several pieces from the cantata BWV198 for inclusion in his lost St Mark’s Passion, in which the first movement was now set to the words “Geh, Jesu, geh zu deiner Pein”.

Augustus’s seat Dresden was a favourite destination of one particular, much-missed victim of the present pandemic. Robert Avery, who died on 10th April, was the founder of and animating spirit in Habsburg Heritage, a company which specialised in musical and cultural trips to central Europe; its aficionados travelled with him again and again. Robert, who was equally at home in a Palladian villa, an Esterházy palace, a Burgenland synagogue, a mass in Eisenstadt and a Thuringian sausage-stall, would have pulled a wry face at appearing in an essay alongside Sebastian Bach. His eclecticism was endearing and inexhaustible: the programme for a recent Ring cycle in the Dresden Semperoper was interleaved on nights off with Yo-Yo Ma’s performance of all six Bach cello suites in the Frauenkirche and a performance of Avery’s beloved Die tote Stadt by Korngold. (Wagner would not have approved.)

If our present circumstances have taught us anything about music, it is that its ideal realisation depends on a mysterious congruence of three forces in the same physical space: the composer, the performer and the audience. Though the hierarchy of these constituents ranks the listener far below the performer who is in turn far inferior to the composer, all three are mutually interdependent. Live-streaming is all very well, and far better than nothing, but it is not the real thing. The original performers of Bach’s funeral cantata were given almost no time to rehearse, as the mere two-day period between his completion of the score (marked on the autograph) and the date of the mourning service will have been further shortened by the need to write out the individual parts. May there soon and eternally be reunited performers such as those who rose to the challenge in October 1727, composers—of whom the zenith is J.S. Bach—and listeners of the calibre of Robert Avery. Such is music. 

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To raise this issue is not to license the wholesale denigration of someone who is obviously one of the most significant and expressive voices in 20th century music. Few music-lovers would want to be without the 8th and 10th symphonies, half a dozen of the string quartets, the 2nd piano trio and the string concertos at least. Others would add the preludes and fugues, the song cycles, and the last movement of the piano quintet—which captures that most elusive of states, the unbearable lightness of being. Yet even these masterpieces do not put the question to rest: what is it about Shostakovich which makes some withhold the highest approval? Does he deserve to be ranked alongside Bartók, Stravinsky or even Britten?

The story of Shostakovich’s relations with the Soviet state is better known than even his most familiar music: its main episodes are his exceptional early promise, the calamitous rebuke by Stalin, on the eve of the Great Terror, over his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the return to favour through his composition of the enduringly popular 5th symphony (which the conductor Esa Pekka-Salonen considers wildly over-rated) under the slogan “A Soviet artist’s creative response to justified criticism”, the compositions forged in the Great Patriotic War, and the subsequent slavish toeing of the official line (he joined the Communist party in 1960 long after the death of Stalin, and made speeches containing emetic statements such as “The artist in Russia has more freedom than the artist in the West”). Despite the continuing production up to his death in 1975 of many serious works alongside the film music and choruses served up for political purposes, many influential western critics tended during his lifetime to write him off: Harold C. Schonberg described him after 1936 as “ruined as a composer . . . after the 5th symphony he was to write nothing but safe music, repeating old formulas”.

Then came the publication, four years after his death, of the pseudo-memoir Testimony, in which Solomon Volkov claimed to have taken down in shorthand Shostakovich’s own recollections. It portrayed the composer in a quite different light—as a secret dissident, whose serious works represented an encoded critique of the regime, the apparent loyalist providing in his music a hidden, autobiographical commentary on the bestialities of Stalinist rule. Although there are numerous problems with accepting the strict authenticity of Testimony, the better view, supported by the composer’s son Maxim among other direct witnesses, is that it paints a broadly accurate picture of Shostakovich’s true self, in particular his lacerating self-reproach for having conformed to a regime which he abhorred. Thus the way opened to a reading of Shostakovich’s work as a Solzhenitsyn-like chronicle of life under totalitarianism.

Following the Volkov revelations, a general reassessment of his music then took place. Has that re-evaluation led to an over-valuation? Is the real Shostakovich problem the tendency of some listeners to read into his works an extra-musical agenda which detracts from its abstract virtues? Supporting the latter view, Valery Gergiev said of the 5th symphony that it was “time to find more music in this music”. On the other hand, the dedicatee of Shostakovich’s viola sonata, his last completed work, wrote: “People who lived in [his] epoch have no need to dig in the archives or to marvel at the evidence of repressions and executions and murders. It is all there in his music”. Whether interpreting Shostakovich’s works as an aural counterpart to The Gulag Archipelago clarifies or trivialises them may remain a bone of contention for years to come; but Terry Teachout has rightly observed that many western listeners were deaf to the music’s virtues until told that it was really “about” the horrors of Stalinism. This suggests that the music does require some appreciation of its internal programme to have achieved its current high standing—or at least that it benefits from such a perspective.

The possibility of reading the music in this sort of way is, among the major composers, unique to Shostakovich. No one who listens to Schubert is ever reminded of the repressive Metternich regime under which he wrote it. If, more appositely, we compare Shostakovich with his near-contemporary Prokofiev, whose relations with the authorities were less problematical at least until the post-war period, it becomes obvious that the former’s music is perfectly suited, and must surely in many cases have been intended to describe and reflect the world of the Soviet Union. Those whose forebears avoided the experiences of 20th-century fascism and communism have an enduring, occasionally almost prurient fascination with the evidence of witnesses who testify to their endurance of these regimes. When we hear Shostakovich, we seem to accompany it with semi-conscious visual narratives: it is as if a grainy black-and-white film of the siege of Leningrad itself is playing before our eyes as we listen to the symphony depicting the event (one of his least appealing). This is the ground on which Shostakovich, as far as we can tell, chose to stand, and on which it is therefore fair to judge him.

Another, related difficulty is the prevalence of the ironic mood in the music. It is hard to think of any composer before Mahler (whose psychological essays are in some senses the counterpoint to the socio-political music of Shostakovich) who wanted to be understood ironically, but in the Russian’s case, the tendency is near-universal—and for good reason, since if Volkov is to be believed, it would have been suicidal for the composer to make his true feelings known. The wellspring of this disposition is the fact that he was capable of extremely funny music, for example his 1958 operetta Cheryomushki (although he wrote privately that the piece made him “burn with shame”). However, the trouble with irony is that it can too easily be used as an excuse for bombast or rhetoric. As David Fanning has written, “there is no music so empty-headed or incompetent that it cannot in principle be interpreted ironically. To play the irony card may be merely to sanction an abandonment of artistic standards.” A related problem in the music is a certain studied ambiguity: it would be absurd to suppose a piece by Beethoven or Wagner does not mean what it says; but as Fanning points out, so many of Shostakovich’s works end with a question-mark or three dots.

For those who prefer music to be less self-conscious and to make its impact on the abstract level of pure forms, all of this is a distraction and may even be an irritation. It can give rise to the feeling that a little of Shostakovich’s music goes a long way. This unworthy opinion is enhanced by the occasional thought that the devices in his compositional locker are not as varied or as numerous as they might be. This is a paradox, for he was a composer of the utmost facility and eclecticism, who could write fluently in any number of genres, from the sub-Rachmaninovian (the first movement of the cello sonata; the second movement of the second piano concerto), to the raspingly avant-garde (his opera The Nose). As a non-practitioner of dodecaphony and serialism, both of which were out of the question in the USSR, he deserves our permanent gratitude. However, even in the compositions which he himself seems to have taken most seriously, there is an undeniable if intermittent sense of sameness. Among their features we may in our more censorious moments list grey, undistinguished melodies (“not his strongest point”, Grove observes), sardonic harmonies, predictable scampering passages typically in dactylic rhythms, long paragraphs of circumpolar gloom, a habit of writing in widely-spaced octaves, and orchestration that leans heavily on the piccolo or the side drum. There also appears sometimes to be an inverse relationship between the length and volume of a work and the amount of its musical content. A Festival Hall concert pairing the long and noisy 4th symphony with the crystal economy of Mozart’s piano concerto K595 provided such a memorable contrast of compositional means that it subsequently featured (albeit for other reasons) in Julian Barnes’ short story “Vigilance”.

The sheer extremity of the music is another striking feature, whether conveying manic elation, aggression, mockery or despair. An instance of the last of these moods is the 15th quartet, which (like the valedictory viola sonata) teeters on the verge of self-parody: six successive adagio movements, the first of which he insisted was to be played “so that flies drop dead in mid-air and the audience start leaving the hall from sheer boredom”. It is as if the emotions generated are so blatant as to obscure the music itself, a line which two of his significant influences, Tchaikovsky and Mahler (both more gifted composers) came close to crossing, but never quite did. Whatever is meant by profundity in music—the abstract quality above all that, together with beauty, makes people want to listen to it—Shostakovich achieved only intermittently. The constraints within which he had to operate fashioned his stream into a different course. We will therefore derive the most satisfaction from his work if we accept that it is best understood as a permanent and eloquent description of a monstrous tyranny, and recognise that in general it is unhelpful to divorce it from that context.

At its best, this merging of music and historical commentary creates works of enduring power, and we may take as an example the justly famous 8th quartet, written “in memory of the victims of fascism and war”. It is spell-binding from start to finish. Although it begins with a homage to Beethoven, the piece is full of autobiography and self-quotation; it unmistakably evokes both the suffering of the Jewish people, which this most philo-Semitic of composers treated as a synecdoche for all mid-20th century human miseries, and the omnipresent fear of the secret policeman. Shostakovich had lived through both, and for that reason among others the work is invariably a success in performance. Nor in terms of its achievement does it stand alone, even among his quartets, let alone his other best works. So let us perhaps listen to his music a little sparingly, and recognise that, when we do, we are enriched and educated by the fact that (unusually for music) it means something beyond itself, something that can never be forgotten or diminished, and to which Shostakovich’s creative achievement stands as a permanent testimony.

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But what of Mozart? How could any connoisseur bear to be without the da Ponte operas, to say nothing of the Jupiter symphony or the chamber music? In what genre did this greatest of all composers (excepting Bach, obviously) express himself as generously and with as much inspiration as the instances given above? Here is a clue given by Professor Cuthbert Girdlestone, author of one of the most delightful books ever written on the subject of great works of music:

They are an inexhaustible spring of delight. Their diversity corresponds to our most varied moods, from the state of quiet content in which all we ask of art is entertainment, exquisite rather than deep, the exuberance of animal spirits, the consciousness of physical and moral health, to melancholy, sorrow and even revolt, and to an Olympian serenity breathing the air of the mountain tops. The comparative uniformity which we notice between them at first sight disappears with closer scrutiny. The feeling is never the same from one to the other; each one is characterised by a personality of its own and the variety of their inspiration shows itself ever greater as we travel more deeply into them.

Girdlestone originally published Mozart and his Piano Concertos in French in 1939, but it remains widely available in its successive English editions. There is no better company in which to explore a body of work which, for various reasons, may seem a little opaque at first, not least because of the “comparative uniformity” which Girdlestone acknowledges. At the most basic level, each of the concertos is the same shape and follows the same design as the others. There is also the question of numerology. There are 27 of them, in the sense that the last one is No. 27, but Mozart only wrote 23: the first four once attributed to him are juvenile arrangements of the works of other composers, probably undertaken as a pedagogic exercise under the supervision of his father. For this reason among others, the concertos are identified among musicians by their key and Köchel catalogue number. The latter is a form of identification which is off-putting to some, but which for initiates has the advantage of conferring occult meanings on otherwise unremarkable three-digit numbers.(One is reminded of the story which Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy told about his brilliant protegé Srinivasa Ramanujan: “I remember once going to see him when he was ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavourable omen. “No,” he replied, “it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number
expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”)

A small number of the concertos, perhaps five, are widely-known. The 1967 film Elvira Madigan is now principally remembered for its use as theme music of the dreaming andante of the C major concerto, K467. The thought that this sublime piece bears the name of a Danish tightrope dancer is as vexing to the music-lover as is the nomenclature of the bellini cocktail and the tuna carpaccio to an amateur of Venetian art.

Then there is its companion piece, the D minor, K466. As a generalisation, the 19th century esteemed Mozart less than we do now, and the range of his works then known to the public was not large; even so, it had a taste for the composer in his more dramatic and stormier moods. K466, a rare excursion in this context into the minor mode, so captured the attention of subsequent Romantic composers that Alkan, Clara Schumann, Brahms and Busoni all wrote their own cadenzas (passages of solo display, most conspicuously near the conclusion of the first movement, which Mozart himself would typically have improvised in performance, and his versions of which have survived in only a few cases). So did the young Beethoven, a fact which may have helped to keep this concerto in the public eye during the period of Mozart’s relative neglect.

The concerto in A, K488, is also better known than most of its peers: perhaps in part due to the unique slow movement, a siciliano which is Mozart’s only composition in F sharp minor. (The key relation is echoed in Schubert’s piano sonata in A, D959). The D major concerto K537 is notorious only for its nickname (the Coronation concerto), for it is much the least interesting and inspired among the mature members of the series. Finally, the last concerto, in B flat, K595, with its actual or presumed intimations of leave-taking (Girdlestone detects a “wilting” quality to it, though he recognises that the term may be unjust), has gained a certain prominence in an age which likes to detect autobiographical resonances (especially morbidity and the intimation of approaching death) in its concert programmes. These few concertos excepted, there remains a body of at least a dozen lesser known masterpieces, and the question is where the enthusiastic listener should concentrate first in his efforts to get to know them.

There is of course no right answer to this question. It is unnecessary to approach the works chronologically, for each stands alone. However, one must start somewhere, and there is no better key in which to listen to music in dark times than E flat major. Mozart wrote some of his most sublime and rarified music in this tonality, but also some of his most joyful and majestic; it was among the handful of keys that seems to have possessed an especial significance for him, although words will inevitably struggle to convey what that significance was. He chose it for four of his piano concertos, and it is instructive to examine the first and last of these, the concertos K271 and K482. By the scale of Mozart’s short life, these concertos stand far apart, the one written in Salzburg in January 1777, when Mozart was barely 21, and the second in December 1785, composed in Vienna. The second is a mature and perhaps more polished masterpiece than the first; nonetheless, the first piece is not only exceptional on its own terms, but there are also correspondences between the two works which help to acquaint the listener with both.

The K271 concerto is generally known as the Jeunehomme concerto, after the name of its presumed dedicatee, a talented French pianist passing through Salzburg; and this is the title which Girdlestone gives. However, Michael Lorenz has convincingly demonstrated that the concerto is misnamed, and was actually written for a woman called Victoire Jenamy (née Noverre), who lived in Vienna and married a successful merchant there in 1768.  Lorenz’s description of the work itself is justifiably enthusiastic, and his endorsement of the view that Mozart never surpassed it is widely shared, albeit in the last (and pointless) analysis open to question:

If we try to describe briefly the significance of K271, we could without exaggeration call it a musical wonder and a monument of musical originality. In its mastery of orchestration and its stupendous innovations it has no predecessor. It is Mozart’s first really significant composition, “his Eroica” (as Alfred Einstein put it), “one of Mozart’s monumental works which he never surpassed”. By breaking through conventions in an unparalleled creative outburst, a sort of evolutionary leap forward, Mozart reached the level of craftsmanship that distinguishes the piano concertos of his Viennese years. Surprising formal innovations are combined with boundless melodic exuberance.

Among the most immediate and attention-grabbing innovations was Mozart’s unprecedented introduction of the piano at the very outset of the piece, in the second bar, and before the long tutti which according to convention provides the orchestral exposition of the first movement. He never repeated this effect, but Beethoven, who had done something even more unexpected at the beginning of his fourth piano concerto, may nonetheless have had K271 in mind when he wrote his Emperor concerto (in the same key), in which, after a single orchestral chord, the piano part embarks on—of all things—a cadenza at the very outset of the movement, before (as in Mozart’s case) retreating from its presumption to allow the orchestra to declare the main themes of the movement. In K271, at the point where we would normally expect the solo part to make its first entry with the main subject of the movement, Mozart substitutes instead a long, metaphorically off-stage trill, as if the piano seeks with an unwonted gesture of modesty to atone by its second appearance for the arrogance of the first. (There is a not dissimilar effect in the same point of the Emperor concerto.) However, the unconventionality of this movement is irrepressible: ignoring the custom that the piano is not heard after the cadenza, the trill breaks in once more, this time importunately, and we have the momentary impression at the end of the movement that we are to hear the main body of it all over again. Although the orchestra dispels the idea directly, the piano insists on accompanying the movement to its very close.

Mozart here demonstrates the paradox that true freedom by its nature requires constraints; his deviations from “correct” form show the composer utterly emancipated, the master of his medium. The whole piece exemplifies what is so winning about these concertos—the collaboration and contest between the colour and power of the orchestra and the virtuosity and expressiveness of the piano, an effect which Mozart here perfects for the first time. The dialogue between the two forces, the way in which ideas are exchanged, shared—or not shared—and even stolen, is exploited with limitless ingenuity and variety through the canon.

The second movement, an andantino in C minor with muted violins, is Mozart’s first concerto movement in a minor key. Girdlestone calls it a “fragment of a nameless tragedy”. It is no criticism of the piece, which achieves a level of emotional intensity which the composer had never before expressed, that it presents us with tragedy in its youthful, even self-absorbed aspect. It has often been observed that the piece resembles an operatic scene by Gluck, in which Mozart turns the piano into a heroine for whom are scored the most beautiful vocal embellishments. Indeed, the concerto is the first in which Mozart may be said to write operatically; for it is the consistent happy experience of listeners to all the concertos from here onwards, as we will see, to be reminded of the composer in operatic mode. (This is not to say that the operatic medium was uppermost in his mind; it is merely that Mozart’s music always tends in the direction of song, and towards human characterisation).

The main subject in the rondo third movement anticipates Monostatos’s aria “Alles fühlt der Liebe Freuden” in Die Zauberflöte, but the humour in this breakneck finale invites our complicity in a jest that here is at no one’s expense. Of all the felicities of this infectious and virtuosic movement (Frau Jenamy must have been an excellent pianist), the pinnacle comes at the point where we would expect the second episode (following the usual architecture of a rondo). A series of unusual modulations of key warns us that something is afoot, and the presto is then interrupted by, of all things a menuetto cantabile; the breathless two in a bar of the main tempo becomes a gracious and stately triple time, and the piano unfurls an A flat episode in a totally new character, which is prolonged by variations, the orchestra accompanying with enchanted pizzicati and muted strings. The audacity of this coup must have appealed to Mozart, for he used the same effect in two later concertos. Its impact on the listener hearing the concerto for the first time is one of pure delight.

The next solo piano concerto in E flat, K449, stands at the head of the series of 12 such works composed between February 1784 and December 1786. During this period, the genre was numerically predominant among his compositions, which also included the Prague symphony and Le Nozze di Figaro. Despite its inventiveness, we must pass over K449, for it is the E flat concerto, K482 that is the apt comparator to the 1777 work supposedly written for Mme Jeunehomme. The later work falls within the golden period of Mozart’s full maturity and self-assurance. Girdlestone calls it the queenliest of the 23 concertos: “combining grace and majesty, the music unfolds like a sovereign in progress”. Less purely original than some of the works of the previous year, it is nonetheless the culmination of an ”ideal song” which the composer had uttered repeatedly from his youth (including in K271) but which is here rendered in its consummate form, once for all.

The most obvious formal parallels between K482 and K271 are perhaps threefold. Both are works of magnificent self-confidence; both have an emotionally freighted slow movement in C minor; and in the later as well as the earlier work, Mozart repeats the conjuring trick of interrupting the rondo finale with a contrasting, slower section in A flat. The greatest difference between the works, apart from an inexpressible increase in ingenuity, variety and subtlety, is the treatment of the orchestra. There are fine orchestral effects in K271, but the band is generally treated conventionally. By 1785, however, Mozart had met Anton Stadler, and his love affair with the clarinet had begun. He had already embarked on a body of chamber music for wind which makes him the greatest composer of woodwind music of all. (The finest of these pieces is the so-called Gran Partita K361/370a, the piece which Peter Schaffer imagined in Amadeus finally bringing home to Salieri the heaven-sent genius of his “rival”.) With K482, clarinets make their first appearance in the piano concertos, replacing oboes. The listener does not experience the absent oboes as a loss, for the bassoons provide the necessary double-reeded tang; meanwhile the mellifluous sensuality of the clarinets is an incalculable gain, and their presence seems to inspire Mozart to a gorgeousness of wind scoring which is one of the principal appeals of the work.

One does not have to wait long to hear this. Right at the outset, after an orchestral statement built, as with the earlier concerto, around the notes of the E flat major triad, there is a delicately-scored answer on bassoons and horns. The orchestral statement is repeated in identical terms, but the answer is now played by clarinet and violins, whereupon a new phrase is given successively on the flute, by clarinets in thirds, and then by bassoons in sixths. This is exquisite indeed—and we are still on the first page of the score. The music which follows is better enjoyed than analysed, but there is a particular moment in the development section of this movement worth noting, where Mozart again departs from convention—developments, as the name suggests, are supposed to confine themselves to exploring the implications of what has already been heard—by offering us what appears to be a new and melting subject in the subdominant key of A flat major. The pedant may point out that this is merely a refinement of the second subject which appeared in the exposition, but that is not what the ear hears or is intended to hear; and what Mozart is doing is setting down a marker in A flat that will return in the last movement. Those familiar with K271 can ready guess what this will be.

The C minor andante in K482 is a member of the same family as the slow movement of the earlier concerto, though perhaps its suffering is more objective, less theatrical. It moved Girdlestone, meditating on Mozart’s general reputation in the 19th century, to observe that though he is “a great poet of sorrow”, the fact “could not be perceived by a century for whom sorrow did not express itself without shouting, for whom the violence with which an emotion proclaimed itself was the measure of its depth and intensity”. Although the form initially appears to be that of a theme and variations, the second and fourth “variations” are woodwind passages written in contrasting major keys, so different in subject-matter and tone from the grief-laden general ambience of the piece (which is heightened in the poignant coda) that one is put in mind of the sequential episodes of a rondo. It is as if the wind ensemble at the composer’s disposal has actually dictated the form of the piece. Mozart had to repeat this andante at the Vienna premiere of this concerto, because the audience—musical enough to appreciate the greatness of this least spectacular of movements—loved it so much.

The dancing finale once more highlights the wind instruments, and seems to proceed along predictable enough lines, if such an adjective can ever be used about music written with such ingeniousness and subtlety when, at the same point at which the finale of K271 interrupted itself with a spacious minuet in A flat, the same thing happens here. It is a curious example of the way in which Mozart’s musical ideas seem to have been associated with particular keys. (Girdlestone calls the A flat section in K482 a minuet, but it is actually more in the character of a serenade.) Whilst the similarity between the two interpolations is striking, they have differing internal structures. There is, however a greater point of difference, and it is one which takes us to the heart of Mozart’s genius.

We can only understand the emotional richness in the later episode if we think of the music which Mozart wrote for two of his supreme operatic moments—both scenes about human fallibility and the need for forgiveness. The mood is that of the culmination of Figaro, which is not the reconciliation between Figaro and Susanna, who we might suppose will live happily ever after, but between the Count and Countess, who we know will not. Even closer in atmosphere to this passage, and also set in the key of A flat, is a scene towards the end of act 2 of Così fan tutte, an opera not written until four years later. We are at the height of the human folly which that opera anatomises, as three of the “wrong” lovers sing a rapt toast to each other ahead of their imminent marriages, while the fourth stands apart in isolated disgust. If ever foolishness required absolution, it is now, but the music takes itself wholly seriously and, as the lovers’ pledges are exchanged in intoxicated terms, time itself seems to pause. Thus, we come to see that the destiny of the lovely K482 serenade is to have been realised in an ideal form in these two heart-stopping moments of operatic stillness. And on a different plane, the two clarinets, whose thirds and sixths are such an integral part of the character of the concerto, in due course acquire the human characters of two silly and sensual sisters, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, much of whose music is indeed written for that instrument.

Our present self-isolation encourages unrealistic ambitions. For many, the long-envisaged conquest of Ulysses, War and Peace, or even volume one of The World as Will and Representation may never take place. Lock-down may prove to be like a long-haul flight: simultaneously tedious and over too soon. Many more people know Mozart’s operas and other celebrated pieces than his piano concertos. Not only can knowledge of each enhance the other, but the concertos—no longer than half-an hour apiece—are a manageable object of study and like all great music confer, for as long as they last, a blessed forgetfulness of self and the world, which is the true meaning of ecstasy.

This article is taken from the May/June 2020 issue of Standpoint. To subscribe to the print and digital editions, including a full digital archive, click here.

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The devout sceptic (Standpoint, September 2018) seeks what good he may find in each of the world’s great religions. Although the antonym Islamophilia is often used in contemporary media as a derogatory term implying unquestioning, even slavish acceptance of all Muslim values, it must be a healthy exercise for open-minded non-Muslims to identify and examine those aspects of Islam which invite their particular admiration or respect.

This is especially so because there are some parts of the world where to be a Muslim is to be less than a second-class citizen, and where Islamophobia does closely resemble antisemitism. Remarkably, the worst of these cases is India. This is despite the fact that it has a Muslim population of 200 million; only Indonesia and probably Pakistan have a larger number of Muslims. It is also despite the fact that the original tragedy of partition in 1947 was mitigated by the adoption in 1950 of an Indian constitution that strongly and explicitly embraced secular values, promising equality between the practitioners of all faiths and decreeing that there was to be no state religion.

This laudable state of affairs remained broadly in place, whatever other difficulties India may have experienced, until the rise to power of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP has always had close ideological and other links with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a long-standing right-wing nationalist, Hindu supremacist, paramilitary organisation. The RSS opposed the 1950 constitution; it refused to accept the Indian tricolour, promoting a saffron flag (the colour associated with Hinduism). One of its former members, Nathuram Godse, assassinated Gandhi because he was too
favourably disposed towards Indian Muslims. One must be careful about lazy or inaccurate use of the term, but the RSS truly deserves to be labelled fascist.

The BJP won its first general election in 1998, but it is under the present BJP prime minister Narendra Modi, who has been in power since 2014 and who has long been a member of the RSS, that the situation has deteriorated catastrophically. As Nabanita Sircar wrote in the previous issue of Standpoint, “Today, the country is providing a home for masculine nationalism and religious intolerance, which are becoming a serious threat to democracy.” A recent correspondent to The Times referred to the RSS and Modi’s core mission of “tearing India away from the secular, inclusive policies that it adopted at independence and turning it into a Hindu nation”. The home affairs minister, Amit Shah, exemplifies this: during a campaign in 2019, he described undocumented migrants from Muslim-majority Bangladesh as “termites”. At least tens of thousands of Muslims are now imprisoned in Indian detention camps. Some observers even fear that the country is sleepwalking towards its own Holocaust.

As Hindu nationalism swells across India, statues and temples are being raised in Godse’s honour. The state government of Uttar Pradesh, led by a Hindu monk, has proposed changing the name of the city of Meerut, where the 1857 Mutiny first broke out, to Godse Nagar, so paying tribute to the murderer of a man whose image is still on every Indian bank-note. Communal riots in Delhi have killed dozens (on both sides) in the last weeks. Extremist Hindus call for Muslims to be expunged from the capital—from Delhi, of all places, where over 800 years of Muslim supremacy produced the Qutb Minar, Humayun’s tomb, and the Red Fort and great Friday mosque built by Shah Jahan himself.

India would therefore seem a suitable place in which the devout sceptic might concentrate attention on all that is treasurable in Islam. The country is celebrated for its architectural marvels built by Muslims: the Taj Mahal even merited a few minutes of Donald Trump’s time during the US president’s visit in February 2020 (the principal apparent purpose of which was to receive the vacuous adulation of a large crowd gathered in an Ahmedabad cricket stadium alongside a gratified, fawning Modi). Less well-known than this mausoleum, described by Rabindranath Tagore as a tear-drop on the cheek of time, is a fort in the desert city of Nagaur, about 300 miles west of Agra, and which also was known to Shah Jahan. It is here that an annual festival takes place in celebration of Sufism—the mystical dimension of Islam which in its way beautifies the Muslim religion quite as much as any of its exquisite mosques or tombs.

The western mind, particularly in its orientalist cast, has always had a soft spot for Sufism. It associates it with the devotional worship of, and a longing for union with, a transcendent God; earthly love as a metaphor for love of the divine; music and dance (especially whirling dervishes) as means to that end, and the inspiration of a corpus of sensual poetry some parts of which have found their way into English anthologies. (The most famous example of a Sufi poem known in the west is the Rubbáiyát of Omar Khayyám, although FitzGerald’s free translation tells us more about him than about the 11th century Omar the tent-maker, and the identification of Omar as a Sufi is contested.)

It was towards the middle of the seventh century that Islam expanded beyond the borders of Arabia into the empires of the Middle East. The caliphs became heir to the lands of the Hebrews, the Byzantines, the Persians and the Greeks. The conquerors reached the south of France in the west, and the valley of the Indus in the east. It was to the centres of learning in these vast areas of Muslim domination that Arab mystics came, who believed that there was an essential unity among the teachings of all faiths. Like John the Baptist, they wore camels’ wool, and according to tradition were known as Sufis—people of wool. Their teachings passed into each of the lore and practice of Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists. This diffusion of Sufi thought occurred principally during the period AD 700-1500, and it was during this era that the classical masters of Sufism lived and taught. So relates Idries Shah, who wrote many books on the subject and counted among his admirers Robert Graves and Doris Lessing. He goes on to explain that formal religion for the Sufi is a shell: once human consciousness has penetrated beyond the mere social framework, the real meaning of religion can be understood. As a matter of logic, there could thus be no conflict between Sufism and Islam (at least in its pre-modern form); many Sufi masters regarded themselves as orthodox Muslims, who revered them in turn.

Sadly, contemporary puritan Salafism adopts a far more antagonistic approach. Yet no amount of anathematisation by Muslim fundamentalists can alter the fact that a core element of Sufism is its religious syncretism. The essence of this truth is captured, as so often in Sufism, by a story. It is not surprising that Sufism adopted the older and well-known Hindu tale of six blind men confronted by and touching different parts of an elephant, and concluding that they had all encountered different animals. Less well-known is the story of four men of different nationalities who were standing in a village street. They were travelling companions making for some distant place, but at this moment they were arguing over how to spend a single piece of money which was all that they had between them. Each of them wanted to buy something, which he named in his own language. A passer-by told them to give him the coin, and undertook to satisfy the conflicting desires of each of them. He bought four small bunches of grapes. It transpired that each of them had been demanding that the money be spent on grapes, but in his own tongue. The story has this further element. The travellers wanted grapes and grapes they were given, but the essence of the fruit, and its real treasure, was wine. Shah writes that the passer-by is the Sufi, “who shows the travellers that the basis of their religions is the same. He does not, however, offer them wine, the essence, which is the inner doctrine waiting to be used in mysticism, a field far more developed than mere organised religion.”

The basic Sufi averment is that it is not a religion; it is religion. This claim is inherently attractive to those who regard religions as man-made expressions of human striving towards the Deity rather than as dictated by Him, and it bears emphasising that there lies within Islam to this day a strain of belief which asserts unity amid plurality and the consequent necessity for mutual religious acceptance. Historically, this recognition was not confined to Sufism. The greatest of the Indian Mughal emperors, Akhbar, concluded from his discussions with wise men of many faiths that no single religion could claim a monopoly of truth; this inspired him in 1582 to create a combined faith, drawing principally on Hinduism and Islam, but also other religions. The most beautiful building in Fatehpur Sikri, the city which he founded, is a tomb to the Sufi saint Salim Chisti, and in many places in Northern India—Delhi, Ajmer and Nagaur—the burial sites of Sufi divines remain places of pilgrimage and veneration, despite a contemporary climate of Muslim hostility to Sufism.

Much controversy surrounds the degree of influence which Sufism may be said to have had on the medieval and modern western worlds. Among the practices which can arguably be traced back to Sufi sources are the chivalric tradition of courtly love, the Garter ceremony, freemasonry and alchemy (misunderstood in the west as a literal rather a symbolic process). There are those who see the writings of Farīd ud-Dīn ‘Aṭṭār (1145-1221) echoed in Chaucer and Bunyan; and there is no doubt that Oscar Wilde’s story “The Nightingale and the Rose” is a direct lift from ‘Aṭṭār’s Parliament of Birds. Dante’s debt to Islam, originally posited in Professor Miguel Asín’s Muslim Eschatology in the Divine Comedy (1919), has previously been discussed at length in Standpoint (by Ian Thomson; September 2018). Influences on Dante may include one of the greatest of all Sufi mystics, ibn ‘Arabī (1165-1240), whose symbolist poetry is enlightened (unusually) by a commentary of his own authorship. Jalāl-ad-Dīn Rūmī (1207-1273), the most anthologised Sufi poet in English and described by Professor Arthur Arberry as “the greatest mystical poet in the history of mankind”, was a firm religious pluralist, who asked “When will you cease to worship the pitcher? When will you begin to look for the water?” His writings emphasise the unknowability of God, and that the way to approach him is through love alone, utterances which correspond to the 14th-century English text, The Cloud of Unknowing. Many other thinkers, such as Aquinas, Goethe and Jung, may also reasonably be said to bear the Sufi imprint.

The fort at Nagaur: A synthesis of Mughal and Rajput architectural styles, perfectly designed for musical gatherings (© Jonathan Gaisman)

Nagaur is situated roughly equidistant between Bikaner and Jodhpur in northern Rajasthan. At its heart, and surrounded by a massive enceinte whose walls date back to the 4th century, is the Ahichhatragarh fort, (“the fort of the hooded cobra”). Rebuilt in the 12th century, it was further developed by Akbar and Shah Jahan, and in the 17th century became part of the kingdom of Jodhpur. Later palaces were constructed, in particular by Bakhat Singh, who lived at Nagaur between 1720 and 1740 before succeeding his brother to the Jodhpur gaddi (throne). The result is an agreeable synthesis of Mughal and Rajput—Muslim and Hindu—architectural styles, which happens to reflect Akhbar’s own syncretic beliefs. Moreover, Rajasthan is a state where the two religions live peaceably side by side, and in general (unlike neighbouring Gujarat) have always done so. The fort was taken over by the Indian Border Security Force in 1947 to patrol the new frontier with Pakistan, and fell into disrepair. In 1973, it was returned to the present Maharaja, who with particular support from the Getty Foundation and the Helen Hamlyn Trust achieved a remarkable work of recuperation. The external walls, previously raided for building materials, are now reinstated; visitors may make a circuit of the ramparts and visit the temples of Ganesh or Krishna incorporated within them, while the sound of the muezzin drifts up from the city’s mosques at sunset. Inside the fort, the pavilions, pleasure gardens, reservoirs, loggias and fount-ains have all been repaired. The frescoes in the palaces too have been painstakingly restored (by a team from the Courtauld Institute); trees, vases of flowers, elephants and dancing girls enliven the walls once more.

The fruits of this cultural resurrection may be enjoyed by the traveller, for the Nagaur fort is now a hotel. Outside the central part of the fort are ten stone havelis, each originally built for one of Bakhat Singh’s queens and her servants. These too have been rebuilt and converted into 27 guest rooms; the hotel is called the Ranvas, the abode of queens. It is a peaceful place, and for most of the time the garden, dining pavilion and shaded swimming pool are shared only with red-vented and white-eared bulbuls, whose constant carolling is one of the most characteristic sounds of rural India.

During every February since 2008, however, the fort takes on a very different atmosphere, for it is then host to a three-day celebration of Sufi music, the World Sacred Spirit Festival. To those who have experienced the fort in its sleepier aspect, it now becomes clear that the whole place is perfectly designed for such an occasion. A previously ignored daïs in the Diwan-i-Am (hall of audience) is transformed into the ideal platform on which Rakesh Chaurasia may evoke an India as old as the Upanishads with the sounds of the ancient bansuri flute. A spreading peelu tree (salvadora persica, the mustard tree of the New Testament) provides shade for the songs of Madan Gopal Singh, a Sikh professor of English literature when not a Sufi musician, whose chosen accompanists are a Christian, a Hindu and a Muslim. Recesses in the walls of the ordinarily deserted Dipak Mahal are filled with hundreds of oil lamps for a late night qawwali concert given by local Rajasthani
musicians. There can be no better place than Nagaur in which to immerse oneself in the performative aspects of Sufism. The audience is limited to 250, most of whom are accommodated in comfortable tents (with reassuring plumbing) installed for the
occasion. Perhaps a majority of those who attend are Indian; certainly a significant minority are not. The Maharaja is unobtrusively present; others less so—for one of the lesser pleasures of the festival is in observing the numerous and conspicuous daily changes of clothes with which the more narcissistic European spectators take time to adorn themselves.

Listeners whose knowledge is confined to western classical music will find that the three-day experience elicits the recognition of almost total ignorance, and also stimulates a process of learning. Both are welcome, for it is humbling to encounter for the first time musicians who are in fact internationally famous, and the thought arises that it is sometimes better to open a new chamber in the mind by grappling with the unfamiliar modes and quarter-tones of Sufi music than to listen yet again to a familiar Viennese concerto, however much admired. This year, the shock-haired Walid ben Salim from Morocco, who sang from the poems of ibn ‘Arabī in his native tongue, and was accompanied on the guzhang or Chinese lute by Jiang Nan, so haunted the audience with the range and concentration of his singing that he was called upon to give not one but two further unscheduled concerts. Mohammad Motamedi, an Iranian traditional vocalist and ney (flute) player, has an electrifying voice and technique which are unforgettable once heard, and his recordings of Persian classic-al song are easily accessible online, had one but previously known it. From all corners of the Muslim world, from Oman to Senegal, performers come to Nagaur and make music from morning till late into the night. After three days, the festival transfers to Jodhpur itself for a further two days of concerts, albeit given to larger audiences and in a less intimate setting.

Madan Gopal Singh, a professor of English literature when not a Sufi musician, at the World Sacred Spirit Festival (© Mehrangarh Museum Trust)

There is a limit to the knowledge which a British participant can acquire from immersion in three days of Sufi performance —however carefully he may have read in advance the excellent Penguin Classics collection of Islamic Mystical Poetry edited by Mahmood Jamal, or attempted to weigh the ambitious claims made on behalf of Sufism by Idries Shah. Yet the World Sacred Spirit Festival cannot but enhance admiration for one of the profoundest productions of a religion which, despite the antagonising abrasions of modern Wahhabism, has much to offer the disinterested non-devotee. Nagaur is one place in India where Modi’s writ fortunately does not run, where Islamophobia and prejudice seem a world away, and where people of every creed and none can satisfy their curiosity in the relaxed and unselfconscious appreciation of a jewel in the Islamic crown.

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The audience at London’s Barbican Centre rewarded Matsuev with warm applause; he was even enticed to perform an encore. The fact that Matsuev is not just Russian but a friend of Vladimir Putin’s seemed not to matter. A few weeks later, very different attitudes surfaced when Azeri tenor Yusif Eyvazov reportedly refused to perform alongside Armenian soprano Ruzan Mantashyan.

Political ties between Russia and the West are becoming as frosty as those between Armenia and Azerbaijan, as are relations between China and the West. Pundits speak of a new cold war. Even so, Eyvazov is the exception—and the Dresden opera house later said his refusal was all a misunderstanding. Western concert halls are featuring soloists and conductors from Russia and other so-called hostile states.

Last year, Russian conductor Kirill Petrenko assumed the music directorship of the Berlin Philharmonic. This spring Anna Netrebko, one of the world’s leading sopranos (and Eyvazov’s wife), is performing at the best houses in New York, Vienna and Berlin. Even as the US government is going to bat against China over Huawei and industrial espionage, Chinese piano virtuosos Yuja Wang and Lang Lang are touring the US. Meanwhile, Georgian tenor Otar Jorjikia and Greek conductor Theodor Currentzis will perform at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. Young European musicians join Currentzis’s St Petersburg-based orchestra, MusicAeterna. The Carnegie Hall-based National Youth Orchestra of the USA has toured Russia and works with the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing. Carnegie Hall has hosted performances of Chinese culture and Russian music.

This state of affairs stands in stark contrast to most other areas of transnational interaction. The 2014 Olympic games in Sochi were tainted by the Russian government’s increasing belligerence. Scientific collaboration is being harmed, too. The US Congress, in particular, is rightly concerned that Chinese researchers are exploiting the intellectual property of US universities for the benefit of the communist government.

Classical music is a rare remaining area where citizens of countries that are at loggerheads (or worse) with one another can interact in a productive manner. “The most important aspect we’re missing in the public debate today is the ability to listen. Listening is fundamental in music-making,” Noseda, an Italian, told me. Indeed, long before the US State Department coined the phrase Track II Diplomacy—encounters between hostile states involving think tank and other civil society experts—in the early 1980s, classical music was Track II. “The world needs to find a layer where we can talk, and that layer is music,” Noseda suggested.

During the Cold War, Warsaw Pact musicians were invited to perform in Nato states. East Germany’s renowned tenor Peter Schreier sang Bach oratorios; Western audiences soaked up the artistry of Soviet pianists Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter. In 1958, American pianist Van Cliburn won the Soviet Union’s Tchaikovsky Competition after the nervous judges had received assurances from Nikita Khrushchev that it was OK. On August 21, 1968, the day the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, the Soviet State Symphony Orchestra played at the Proms in London. As chancellor of West Germany, Helmut Schmidt—a first-rate pianist—conducted his own musical diplomacy through friendships with East German musicians.

The socialist regimes were never entirely comfortable with their artists experiencing the West. Some musicians were banned from foreign travel. In 1965 East Germany’s Neues Deutschland reported a “cloak-and-dagger” plan to entice Gewandhaus Orchestra musicians to defect to the West during a trip to Cyprus. Even so, the de-facto Track II continued. “Musical connections were incredibly important, and the governments on both sides understood that,” noted Sir Clive Gillinson, Carnegie Hall’s executive and
artistic director. “They knew that they had to communicate, and music provided that platform.”

More recently, ensembles have even been created with the intention of easing geopolitical tensions: the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, founded by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said 20 years ago, and, last year, Georgia’s Tsinandali Festival, which features a pan-Caucasian youth orchestra. “At the end of one of our concerts, a Turkish woman got up and hugged an Armenian man,” recalled Noseda, the festival’s music director.

Featuring musicians from the other side does involve moral dilemmas. But just as the network of musical contacts kept relations alive during the Cold War, it can do so today. “The State Department is adamant that what we’re doing is important,” Sir Clive said. To be sure, classical music won’t end wars or even cold wars. But should Putin decide that cooperation is preferable to confrontation he could send a public signal by, for example, attending a performance by Western musicians in Moscow. Xi Jinping could do the same in Beijing. Donald Trump, in turn, could make the brief journey to Washington’s Kennedy Center and listen to the National Symphony Orchestra (coincidentally also led by Noseda) with its soloists from Russia, China and other countries. The Track II encounters arranged by foreign ministries are a worthy effort, but they are mostly conducted for their own sake. The musical interaction is already in place.

There’s another aspect: artistic standards. When Nazi Germany banned Jewish musicians from its concert stages, the quality of its music-making rapidly deteriorated. Some people may not like Matsuev’s friendship with Putin, but he is one of exceptionally few pianists able to pull off the death-defying leaps of Prokoviev’s second piano concerto. “What matters is musical excellence,” Noseda pointed out. Politics should be divorced from artistry—but musicians can help the politicians along.

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The fact that Nimrod encapsulates the mood of those who mourn and remember implies that there is something inherent in it which expresses that ambience, and that we who listen are responding to its especial character. Indeed one could go further and, like musicologist Deryck Cooke in The Language of Music, say that certain melodic shapes, intervals or harmonies so closely and invariably express a corresponding mood as to justify the conclusion that a given musical element contains a specific emotional charge. It follows that whenever we hear that element, we respond predictably. For example, Cooke argues that a two-note falling semitone phrase “gives the effect of a burst of anguish”, and that “this is the most widely used of all terms of musical language; one can hardly find a page of ‘grief’ music by any composer of any period without encountering it several times”. Among the instances he cites are the opening of Mozart’s 40th symphony, and the group of suffering or hate motifs associated with the Nibelungs in Wagner’s Ring cycle.

As those familiar with the Enigma variations will know, the reference to Nimrod above is a trick. We have the composer’s own account of what he was trying to convey in this piece: it has nothing to do with valiant hearts and Flanders fields, but rather “the record of a long summer evening talk, when my friend [August Jaeger] discoursed eloquently on the slow movements of Beethoven”.

We may have collectively induced ourselves to associate the piece with a certain type of occasion and hence become persuaded that it expresses congruent emotions, but in this instance we are demonstrably adrift of what Elgar himself imagined. Perhaps we should therefore hesitate before assenting to the statement that music expresses precise or identifiable emotions. Perhaps we are using a form of shorthand which begs a whole series of questions.

Representing the contrary view, here is Stravinsky in his autobiography:

Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. Expression has never been an inherent property of music. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality.

The illusion is indeed a prevalent one, if that is what it is.

In order to work out whether Cooke or Stravinsky is correct, or whether the truth lies elsewhere, we need to take a step back. According to many philosophers, physical objects possess primary and secondary qualities. The primary qualities refer to properties which exist independently of anyone’s perception of them, so that this Greek temple (say) is rectangular, whether anyone sees it or not; no one can plausibly argue otherwise. An example of a secondary quality is colour: the fact that the temple is grey is a property of the temple, but it is secondary because greyness is something that is produced only when its primary qualities interact with the senses of an observer. This much is reasonably straightforward. But what sort of property does the observer ascribe to a temple when he says that it is beautiful? The answer identified by Hume is that beauty belongs to the sentiment of the spectator and (unlike colour, let alone shape) is not a property of the temple at all; it may be provoked by the temple, but it exists purely in our minds.

If this is true about the Parthenon, it would seem to follow that were we to describe certain music as beautiful, this would not refer to anything actually in the music, but only to our reaction to it. (We are also more likely to argue about which pieces of music are beautiful than which temples are grey.) Can music nonetheless express emotions, which are par excellence mental states which exist only within human beings and which are not properties of notes, staves or scores? No one would dispute that music can evoke emotion, but that is not the same as expressing it. In the former case the emotion is in us, not in the music.

In an attempt to sort this out, one must turn to the wisdom of Sir Roger Scruton (whose recent death has caused such widespread sadness), in particular the longest and most important (if also the least read)  of his books, The Aesthetics of Music (1997). This huge treatment attempts nothing less than a complete philosophy of music, a subject which the author (who was also a composer and pianist) knew from within. It poses intriguing questions which the ordinary music lover may pass over: what are we doing when we listen to music; why do we listen; what are we getting out of it? 

In a markedly original piece of philosophical analysis, Scruton goes back to the beginning, and examines what sound is, and what distinguishes sound from tone, the latter term being used to describe the sound of music. (In German, the word Ton means both tone and note, and Tonkunst—literally  the art of tones—is an archaic word meaning music.) He takes the distinction between primary and secondary qualities and applies it to events. Primary events in the physical world (a glass breaking or a triangle struck, each producing vibrations in the air) produce sounds audible to the human ear. These sounds, like the greyness of the temple, are secondary events; but they do not constitute music. It is only when sounds become tones that music emerges:

A tone is a sound which exists in a musical “field of force”; this field of force is something that we hear when hearing tones. When we hear music, we do not hear sound only; we hear something in the sound, something which moves with a force of its own.

The transformation from sound to tone is accomplished within the act of hearing and may have no independent reality. It points to the fact that music exists in the realm of intentionality and purpose.

Music is therefore made by humans alone. As Professor Robert Grant has pointed out in his essay on Scruton’s The Aesthetics of Music, birds do not make music when they sing any more than hyenas laugh because they have a sense of humour. To talk of the music of birdsong is to employ a metaphor, namely (in Aristotle’s definition) to apply a term or phrase to something which is known not to exemplify it. Metaphor is fundamental to music.

A set design for the “Queen of the Night” scene in “Die Zauberflöte”, by Giuseppe Quaglio, c.1795 (©INTERFOTO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

One of the strangest yet most irreducible aspects of our listening to music is the fact that we create a virtual sound space in which the notes are heard. Take, for example, our sense of up and down, of higher and lower notes—as illustrated by the Queen of the Night’s arias in Die Zauberflöte. Nothing is more basic than our sense of music rising and falling, of its moving from one level to another. In fact, there is nothing in the music which requires us to describe high notes as high and low notes as low. We could equally well call high notes low­—and the ancient Greeks did. The idea that we have of the movement within music is itself a construct. In each case, we are using a metaphor to describe a physical event which consists simply in the vibration of sound waves. Although less easy to verbalise, the same is true of the ways in which we characterise or respond to a particular pattern of notes, whether successively (a melody) or simultaneously (harmony); likewise the times at which these notes are uttered (rhythm). Onto the prosaic fact of the nature and frequency of sounds’ physical pitch and the silences between them we heap all sorts of other metaphors: we talk of music soaring or plunging, a striving melody, a piercing harmony or a syncopated rhythm. In doing so we create a space in which the notes belong, and in which they have relationships with each other. These connections are not in the notes; they are perceived by us. To return to Nimrod, you will not find a falling seventh anywhere in the score: you will just see a succession of crotchets: E flat, F, D, E flat etc. The rest is happening inside your head.

Just as Kant said that we cannot conceive of objects without situating them in a spatial frame, and psychologist Julian Jaynes pointed out that we cannot think of time other than spatially (so that 1066 in our mind’s eye is either to the left of or above 1914), so too we situate what we hear as music in the dimensions of virtual space. In a literal sense, sounds do not occupy space; we create that space. Scruton argues that metaphor is an indispensable explanation of the way in which we hear music:

One and the same experience takes sound as its object, and also something that is not and cannot be sound—the life and movement that is music . . . The metaphor cannot be eliminated from the description of music, because it defines the intentional object of the musical experience. Take away the metaphor, and you take away the experience of music.

The experience of music is therefore somewhat like the experience of beauty: an animal can see the properties of a Greek temple and hear the sounds that constitute music. Only human beings can see the temple as beautiful, and hear the sounds as music.

The problem of locating emotion within music is compounded by the fact that pure music is abstract: it does not refer to or describe anything. As Oliver Sacks wrote in Musicophilia, music “has no concepts, makes no propositions; it lacks images, symbols, the stuff of language. It has no power of representation. It has no necessary relation to the world.” We have no difficulty in locating the emotion within a van der Weyden Deposition, because the painting is representational; we find sadness in facial expressions or gestures of hand. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of drama and fiction. Nonetheless, and despite the difficulty of identifying how it could be that music actually expresses emotion, there is a wide consensus not only that it does, but also that certain music has a specific emotional content. The finale of Mozart’s Jupiter symphony may not make us experience joy if we ourselves are feeling gloomy, but in our less analytical moments we persist in feeling that the piece itself expresses joy. This is an illusion, but the question remains why it is such a powerful one. Two answers suggest themselves.

The first is that, as already implied, we tend to confuse music’s power to express emotion with its power to evoke emotion. The almost boundless human capacity to establish associations, typically of a non-verbal nature, between unrelated objects operates powerfully in the musical field. The associations are strengthened by inherited cultural conventions which we may imbibe subconsciously. We are used to the fact that drooping figures in the minor mode have for centuries been deployed in order to convey grief, and so when for the first time we hear a piece with these musical characteristics, we make the conventional association. (This is incidentally one answer to Cooke’s doubtful claim that the music is itself expressing grief.)

‘Music is obviously expressive, and the expressive qualities of a work of music form the most important part of its content; but it expresses nothing except itself’

If we ask what exactly is funny in a humorous piece by Haydn, we may find that it is the confounding of expectations, or a self-mocking absurdity in the music, both of which remind us of the techniques of good joke-telling. Schubert’s song Der Neugierige concerns the young lover in Die schöne Müllerin asking a question to which he longs to know the answer: does she love him? The song’s introduction imitates the inflections in human speech of question and answer. A more complex example is provided by Schopenhauer’s uncheerful view that “the essence of a human being consists in the fact that his will strives, is satisfied and strives anew, [that] the absence of satisfaction is suffering and the absence of a new desire is empty longing.” The philosopher himself drew the analogy between this state of affairs and music’s tendency to depart from the tonic (home) key, to visit different keys and dissonances and then to wind back to the tonic. Wagner was inspired by Schopenhauer’s philosophy to write an opera which depicted a longing so extended and unrequited that it could only be conveyed in music by an almost infinitely-delayed resolution to the tonic. The result was Tristan und Isolde. These and countless other cases exemplify the role of association and therefore metaphor in music. Music’s expressive power is revealed in its ability to summon these metaphors from us, and to persuade us that they fit exactly. It is a mystery that they fit. But the mystery is immovable.

The second explanation for the illusion that music expresses specific moods is to recognise a distinction between transitive and intransitive uses of the word “express”. Music is obviously expressive, and the expressive qualities of a work of music form the most important part of its content; but it expresses nothing except itself. A sensible teacher may urge a pupil to play a passage more expressively, but does not go on to indicate what is to be expressed, any more than a composer needs to write more than “espressivo” in the score. The question what is expressed by the music is in the end answered by pointing to the particular work in all its complexity, and saying “this”. The description of the expressive content in a piece of music is simply a description of the music. It is an attempt through metaphor, to identify what we hear when we hear with understanding.

In the case of classical music, the informed and attentive listener will derive more pleasure from what he hears than the beginner. A grasp of the structure of the piece, for example, conveys more information and therefore enables him to hear more of what the music expresses. It is unthinkable that one could have a complete experience of the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica or Brahms’s fourth symphony without understanding the astonishing architecture of these pieces. Of the latter, Scruton writes:

The effect is one of the most powerful in all romantic music, of tragic feeling that is nevertheless utterly controlled, and utterly in control. And that is the meaning of the music: the aural presentation of a sincere and solemn gesture—the gesture which never betrays itself as a pretence, which never stumbles, as it unfolds with unanswerable authority the complete motive to action, and the justifying narrative which brought it into being. The listener is presented with an instance of human integrity, in which a life is concentrated in a timeless instant.

The great triumphs of music involve a synthesis whereby a musical structure, moving according to its own logic, compels our feelings to move along with it, and so leads us to rehearse a feeling at which we would not otherwise arrive. Thus we reach the ideal state envisaged by Eliot, in which “You are the music while the music lasts.”

If all art constantly aspires to the condition of music (as Walter Pater argued), it is because music achieves the greatest possible distance from the explicit statement, while still inviting us to enter into its expressive content. If this is so, the formalist Stravinsky may have over-reached himself in claiming that “Expression has never been an inherent property of music”. On the contrary, the expressive power of music is one of the main reasons why we listen to it.

The other reason is that music, much more than any other art form, is bound in time, yet makes us forget any sense of time other than that which it creates in the trans-ient moment of its own existence. This too is a mystery, and one which corresponds to the ephemerality of the human condition itself. The final words of Scruton’s very last article (in the Christmas Spectator) were these: “Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.” It is moving to discover that this was no recent thought. Over 20 years earlier, in his great exploration of why it is that music matters, he wrote this about the second subject in the first movement of Schubert’s string quartet in G, D887:

You are being led by the most natural means to enact the lightness and wonder of life just at the point where you should recall it—the point at which fear and foreboding threaten to become morbid. This sympathetic response to the music is also an emotional education: you are rehearsing something that it is very hard to feel—the impulse to selfless gratitude for the gift of life, in full awareness that the gift will soon have vanished.

We must be grateful for the continued existence of Roger Scruton’s writings at least, and console ourselves with the thought that, as with Proust’s Bergotte:

all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection. 

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The first of these works, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (premiered in 1865), is widely known and its significance well recognised; the second is Arnold Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht, written 120 years ago at the same time as Elgar (that most Germanic of English composers) was completing his distinctly un-revolutionary Enigma Variations. One of Verklärte Nacht’s earliest critics opined that it “sounded as if someone had smeared the score of Tristan while it was still wet”, and the remark has fashioned an enduring link between the two compositions, a connection which also exists in purely musical terms.

The “transfigured night” of the title refers to a poem by Richard Dehmel, which Schoenberg had read in 1896. The poet was an advocate of uninhibited sexuality and an opponent of so-called bourgeois values, and Schoenberg admired him as a representative of the Zeitgeist. In 1899, Schoenberg began a relationship with Mathilde, the sister of his friend Alexander Zemlinsky. (She later became his wife.) He composed the sextet in three weeks that September, while on holiday with the pair. The erotic glow expressed in Schoenberg’s Dehmel compositions of the period are expressive of this great passion. As in the case of Schumann, emotional engagement fired his creativity.

Dehmel does not enjoy much esteem these days. The composer Richard Swift writes that “despite the present low ebb of his literary reputation, these poems enjoyed a considerable vogue in pre-war Germany and Austria”; he refers to their post-Baudelairean and Nietzschean sensuousness of imagery and language, giving “an impression of sexual candour so typical of Jugendstil”. Schoenberg himself said in 1950 (disloyally to his younger self) that concentrating simply on the music of Verklärte Nacht “can perhaps make you forget the poem which many a person today might call rather repulsive”.

Dehmel’s verses depict a couple walking in a cold, moonlit grove. A woman confesses to her companion that she is carrying another man’s child. She had yielded to him in despair, hoping to find fulfilment through motherhood. Now she fears that life will take its revenge, and that the true lover whom she has since found will reject her. After a brooding pause, he answers her: “May the child you have conceived be no burden to your soul; see how brightly the universe gleams about us!” He accepts them both, and declares that their love will make the child his own. They kiss and walk on, the formerly barren night transformed by hope and devotion.

Looking at the poem on its purely literary merits, it is indeed difficult not to wince, or, at the mention of the man grasping the woman’s “starken Hüften” (sturdy hips) suppress a snort of derision. However, the poem deserves to be taken seriously precisely because it does not stand on its own. Somewhat similarly to certain Schubert songs, the rank ordinariness of the verse contributes to a work of art in the first rank of beauty. Dehmel himself wrote to Schoenberg in 1912: “Yesterday evening I heard your Verklärte Nacht, and I should consider it a sin of omission if I failed to say a word of thanks. I had intended to follow the motives of my text in your composition; but I soon forgot to do so, I was so enthralled by the music”.

The final page of the string sextet score of “Verklärte Nacht”

Schoenberg and beauty are words that rarely occupy the same sentence. Arguably the most influential composer of all time, his fame derived from his abolition of tonality—the harmonic system of the previous centuries, in which melodies and harmonies relate to the tonic (the home) of a given key. While detractors still demonise him for having destroyed music, the largely self-taught Schoenberg saw his work as a logical evolution of tradition. Frustrated that tonality seemed exhausted and had reached its limits (in other words, what did classical music have to say after Wagner?), Schoenberg felt that he must transcend its constraints. His solution was to equalise the 12 notes of the conventional scale, releasing them from their anchor points and predictable progressions so that they could interrelate freely. While many criticised this as anarchic, Schoenberg found it liberating, an open-ended approach empowering composers to follow their personal creative impulses—expanding upon, rather than rejecting, the approaches and techniques of the past. The new system, however, required basic rules of its own. Chief among these was Schoenberg’s serialism, a system in which all 12 tones are assembled into a “row” whose order (whether original, transposed, inverted or reversed) organises the composition by using each note horizontally or vertically before any is repeated. This joyless system, which by the way the ordinary human ear is quite unable to detect, exemplifies what musicologist Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt refers to as “the vitriolising power of Schoenberg’s aesthetics”.

In 1899, all this lay in the future. At that time, the principal musical influence on the 25-year-old composer was the traditionalist Brahms. The latter’s music—its density, richness and rigour—had a profound influence on Schoenberg’s development, and his engagement with it continued throughout his career: for example, his (1937) orchestral arrangement of Brahms’s piano quartet in G minor has become a staple of the repertoire. From him, Schoenberg learned the creative possibilities of the perpetual manipulation and development of tiny motivic cells, an approach that would eventually underpin the twelve-tone technique. The other discernible influence on Verklärte Nacht is that of Wagner, to whom Schoenberg had been introduced by Zemlinsky, his only real musical teacher. (The harmonic language of the sextet can be said to pick up from where Tristan left off.) “His love embraced Brahms and Wagner and soon thereafter I became an equally confirmed addict. No wonder that the music I composed at that time mirrored the influence of both these masters.” The notorious Brahms-Wagner rivalry was largely an affair of the press, whipped up by critics; Brahms actually professed admiration for Wagner’s music on many occasions. Nonetheless, at a time when the two men were perceived as embodying irreconcilable aesthetic approaches, it was Schoenberg in Verklärte Nacht who succeeded in marrying their influences.

It is an irony that this work remains the most frequently performed and the best-loved of all Schoenberg’s compositions. The atonal and dodecaphonic works written during the subsequent 50 years exercised a tremendous influence on music (and led to a famous spat with Thomas Mann, who portrayed the system novelistically in Doktor Faustus), but audiences at large did not take them to their hearts. It is therefore not unusual to respond warmly to Verklärte Nacht and dislike most of the composer’s other output. It would certainly be a pity for the general listener to avoid the work merely because of the off-putting effect of Schoenberg’s name. For all its occasionally wild chromaticism, it is actually a less radically subversive departure for its time than Tristan und Isolde had been. Thus, the sextet recognisably begins in the sombre key of D minor and concludes conventionally in the corresponding major. Wagner (who had begun his opera in an unknown key and with an unknown chord) was a true revolutionary. Schoenberg was to become one. But that destiny lay in the next century.

What is novel about Verklärte Nacht is that it is almost the first piece of chamber music to tell a story. Numerous orchestral works had already been written which were programmatic in this sense, from Beethoven’s Wellingtons Sieg to Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and Strauss’s tone poems. But among chamber works, there was only the finale of Beethoven’s Op 135 quartet (a half-exception) and Smetana’s explicitly autobiographical quartet From my Life. As Swift writes: “Schoenberg chose a poem with internal structural relations that could be correlated with purely musical processes. The music is not a meandering fantasy or loose improvisation illustrating an anterior verbal plan, but a determined manifestation of the tonal principles of sonata structure.” He sees the man’s and the woman’s utterances as separate sonata form movements contained within introductory, transitory or concluding material. The form of the piece is therefore A-B-A-C-A, where A represents the natural world, and B and C the protagonists within it.

The story is easy to follow in the music. The mood of the surrounding night is invoked first. Afterwards, the woman speaks. So close is the music to the letter of the poem that several melodic passages follow precisely the syllables of the verse. Between the end of her neurotic utterance and the contrasting entry of the man’s voice, there is another inanimate passage. Then comes the turning point of the work, as the man’s love and generosity suffuse the music in the most straightforward and glowing of harmonies. Whereas the woman’s narration is agitated, tonally unstable and metrically insecure, the man’s response is poised, metrically secure and tonally stable. But in musical terms his acceptance of the woman is not to be understood as a patronising or patriarchal gesture, whatever one may make of the poem. For just after his opening statement, there is a short piano phrase which Schoenberg originally marked weich, meaning soft, yielding or tender; the word is etymologically cognate with “weak”. This moment is the fulcrum on which the whole emotional arc of the piece depends: a single phrase reveals the fact that his love is as helpless and needful as hers. At the piece’s conclusion, the transfigured night of the title is invoked in the vibrating luminescence of D major; rolling arpeggios supported by deep-seated pedal points not only sound harmonious—as the paroxysms of the preceding emotions recede into inaudible euphony—but also create in the visual appearance of the score’s final page another kind of beauty.

The work, premiered in 1902, enjoyed an inevitably controversial reception. At an early performance, the players “responded to the furious hissing of the audience with bows and smiles quite as if they had received the most enthusiastic ovation, and when the audience persisted in its protests they calmly sat down to play the complete work a second time.” Zemlinsky submitted it for a performance sponsored by the Wiener Tonkünstlerverein, who rejected it because it contained a chord (a ninth in fourth inversion) which could not be found in the theory books. As Schoenberg later wrote with heavy irony: “Only now do I understand the objection, at that time beyond my comprehension, of that concert society which refused to perform my sextet on account of this chord. Naturally: inversions of ninth chords just don’t exist; hence no performance either, for how can one perform something that does not exist?”

Although in 1917 he arranged the sextet for string orchestra, Schoenberg at least in later life preferred the chamber version, saying that “I am quite sure that nobody would buy the orchestral version anymore if the original string sextet is on the market”. In either case, the composer warned against an excess of expression and sentimentality in performance. Like most music, Verklärte Nacht speaks for itself and does not need to have things done to it by those who play it. So strongly did Schoenberg feel the desirability of restraint that in his 1943 revision he removed from the score descriptive adjectives such as “tender”, “passionate” and “warm”, as well as several brief swells in the musical lines. Yet this apparent shying away from raw or literal emotion was not unqualified or without internal contradiction. On the one hand, his 1950 notes for a Columbia recording state that the piece “does not illustrate any action or drama, but was restricted to portraying nature and expressing human feelings”. Elsewhere he had written that “in all music composed to poetry, the exactitude of the reproduction of the events is as irrelevant to the artistic value as is the resemblance of a portrait to its model”. On the other hand, the same 1950 notes go so far as to specify the musical themes which correspond, for example, to the woman “in desperation now walk[ing] beside the man . . . fearing his verdict will destroy her” or the fact that “his generosity is as sublime as his love”. Schoenberg even refers to the woman’s marriage to the child’s biological father, though no such marriage is mentioned in the poem.

What is the listener to make of these conflicting indications? The composer Charles Ives stated in glib terms the dilemma which, as he saw it, applies to all music with an external programme: “Does the success of programme music depend more upon the programme than upon the music? If it does, what is the use of the music? If it does not, what is the use of the programme?” This apophthegm sounds clever, but actually proceeds on the false premise that the listener must choose between the two. Where music is conceived by the composer with reference to an identifiable external programme, why should we not pay close attention to it? Naturally we should do so in an imaginative, not a literalist spirit, but to ignore (in this case) the poem means that we immediately alienate ourselves from the conditions under which the composer wrote the music. It would be quixotic, for example, to disregard the fact that the violin concerto written by Schoenberg’s pupil Berg was dedicated and contains several musical allusions to the memory of Manon Gropius, Alma Mahler’s daughter, who died at the age of 18.

In the case of Verklärte Nacht, the formal qualities of the music also play their part in the realisation of the programme. For when we hear the affirmative motives and cadences of the sextet’s radiant second half, we discover that the means by which this music is built are essentially the same as those which make up the first half’s contrasting ambience, and that slight alterations of harmony or in the melodic line engender quite different emotions and associations. The transfiguration of the lovers’ states of being and their perception of the natural world about them is happily achieved by a corresponding transformation of the musical ideas out of which the whole piece is constructed. Despite the elderly Schoenberg’s fastidious repudiation of Dehmel’s poem, we therefore need to embrace its narrative, for without it we will never fully enter into the parallel worlds of story-telling and music which the 25-year-old composer alloyed with such passionate ingenuity. 

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Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust has rightly been said by Dominic Lowe to be “one of the most astonishing works of the 19th century. Ostensibly an oratorio, it combines the choral weight of that genre with the dramatic power and grandeur of opera and the intimacy of Lieder”. Rupert Christensen by contrast, from the partial perspective of an opera critic, finds it “a frustrating experience for the listener”, although he concedes that “there is so much beautiful music here”. It is true that the piece is in some senses fragmentary and provides only glimpses (long though they are) of transcendence. As Gerhaher has written, it is more carefully planned and constructed than is sometimes realised (he calls it an “abstract opera”), but it is not a work of formal perfection. No more is Faust itself.

Goethe referred to the 12,111-line drama that occupied him for 60 years of his long life as “incommensurable”, adding that all attempts to bring it within human understanding were in vain. Another reason for the limited exposure of Schumann’s work on these shores is that it is best approached through an acquaintance with Goethe’s text. German as a school subject is in steep decline, and only a few thousand candidates a year take it at A-level (and even then with limited focus on literature); so the British generally do not know Faust, and even educated Germans know little of the two-thirds of the poem which make up its second part.

Faust Part One contains a reasonably accessible (and even stage-able) drama. It begins with a conversation between the Almighty and the devil in the so-called Prologue in Heaven. Echoing the Book of Job, Goethe imagines God allowing the arch-cynic Mephistopheles to attempt to corrupt and win his “servant” Faust. God’s confidence in Faust derives not from the fact that he is devout (he is not), but from the knowledge that whilst this most learned of men is mired in error, he yet strives. When we meet Faust, we see that this striving is the converse of his bottomless dissatisfaction with all that the world has to offer. Mephisto, the spirit of eternal denial, enters his service, and the two bargain that he will gain Faust’s soul if he can ever put before him a pleasure so intense that it induces Faust to address the passing moment with the words “Tarry awhile, thou art so fair”. Their relationship and the compelling struggle for mastery between them occupy Part One, which mainly takes the form of an established 18th-century genre, the bürgerliches Trauerspiel (bourgeois tragedy). For the most poignant episode in the career of unrelieved selfishness which Faust leads across the entire drama is his seduction, with diabolical aids, of the innocent and ignorant Gretchen. In due course, she falls pregnant by him and kills her own child and (inadvertently) her mother, but despite the simple strength of her love for him, she finally rejects his offer of escape from the condemned cell, and is saved by her choice.

Part Two, which unlike the episodic Part One is in the form of a five-act classical tragedy, spreads over a far wider canvas, through imperial court politics, the evils of paper money, alchemy, the contrast between Northern and Greek civilisations, Faust’s union with Helen of Troy and the short life of their son Euphorion, a land reclamation scheme, blindness in old age, and the hero’s death. It is verbose, wildly complex and allusive, and (as Goethe predicted) fully understood by almost no one.

What holds all these elements together is Goethe’s (somewhat self-serving) theology, not only enunciated by God at the outset but intoned by the angels at the very end of Part Two, that it is not good works but rather struggling and striving which create the possibility of salvation. Accordingly, despite the chaos and destruction which he has left in his wake, Goethe does not consign his Faust to hell, as Marlowe and Berlioz supposed to be the wages of the character’s sin. Another destination awaits, and it was one of great interest to Schumann.

Towards the end of Part Two, the story regains simplicity and accessibility. The dying Faust, perhaps tired at last of self-gratification, has an inner vision (for by now he is sightless) of a future world in which others will prosper, on land won back from the sea thanks to a system of dams and ditches which he has built. He foresees that he might then address the passing moment: “Tarry awhile, thou art so fair”. Still striving, he does not quite repeat the original words of the wager, for he uses the conditional tense about something that has not yet happened. It is a nice point for the lawyers whether the devil, as he thinks, has won. Nihilistically triumphant, Mephisto claims his prize at the moment of Faust’s death, but angels intervene to pelt burning roses at the demons who are carrying him away, and his soul is borne heavenwards, on a journey which the poem tells us Gretchen took long before.

The very last scene of the drama depicts a rocky wilderness, said to have been suggested to the poet by the mountain of Montserrat near Barcelona. It is populated by holy anchorites, angels in different stages of perfection and the souls of blessed children; we are on the verge of Paradise, and the almost-redeemed Faust is being carried towards it. It is this scene which inspired the most elevated music that Schumann ever wrote.

Previous musical admirers (Spohr and Schubert, Berlioz and Liszt) concentrated on depicting aspects of the more conventional Part One. Schumann, however, felt immediately drawn to the mystical and unstageable closing of Part Two. This had never been set to music before. Having in 1843 completed his oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri and fully aware of the ambitious and experimental nature of his undertaking, he set to the task in earnest. By the end of 1844, he had completed the realisation in music of Goethe’s final scene. Broadly speaking, he thereafter worked on the text in reverse order, setting three earlier scenes from Part Two and later a further three from Part One. The opening overture was not composed until the final weeks of 1853. Two months later, he flung himself into the Rhine near Düsseldorf in a suicide attempt that led to his internment in an asylum and ended his creative life.

This 10-year gestation was unique in Schumann’s career. While one can hear in the later music the influence of Wagnerian “endless melody”, the scene which he composed first breathes the fresh spirit of his earlier through-composed oratorio style. There is a prevalent misconception that Schumann’s later music represents a decline from the Clara-animated works of his earlier years. No one listening to the beautiful love-passages between Faust and Gretchen in the Garden Scene (composed 1849-1850) could possibly accept this. Nonetheless, of all the beauties in this neglected piece, none matches his setting to music of the culmination of Goethe’s poem.

This tremendous achievement has the character of all the best religious music; it operates on the aesthetic and the spiritual planes alike, and offers both a devotional aid and an aural and quasi-visual experience of the beyond, which even the hardened agnostic cannot entirely resist. Fleshing out the taut allusiveness of Goethe’s poetry, Schumann shows us how Heaven might be. Of course, as the poet says, “All that is transitory is but a parable”; we are in the realms of musical allegory. But we can measure Schumann’s achievement by recalling how disappointing other attempts have been to capture the empyrean in music: the feeble tremolandi in Liszt’s Dante Sonata, for example, or Fauré’s saccharine In Paradisum. (Bach is obviously hors de concours.) The same Goethe text was set with larger forces, at greater length and volume, yet with a fraction of Schumann’s penetration and beauty, by Mahler in the second movement of his Eighth Symphony. When the two works are compared, it is hard not to see Mahler as exhibiting many of the shortcomings which his detractors (sometimes unfairly) level against him—not least a tendency to what is in this context a painful vulgarity. (Mahler’s first movement, a setting of the 9th-century Veni Creator Spiritus, is much more convincing.)

There are details in Schumann’s setting of Goethe’s vision which are particularly worth highlighting. A soul who appears in this final scene is described as “A Penitent Woman, formerly called Gretchen”. The music which Mahler gives her is sweet but shallow; in his hands, the episode passes by as one more voice amid the gaudiness. It should not: for something more numinous is happening. In a poignant echo of her earthly guilt and shame, both Goethe and Schumann have her now repeat her prayer to the Virgin from Part One: then, she bids the Mother of God to look down on her sorrow, but now in Paradise on her happiness. And the reason for her joy is that “her early beloved, his mind no longer clouded, is returning” to her. Even more touchingly, and in a reversal of their terrestrial roles, she begs to be allowed to instruct Faust, “dazzled as he is by the new day”. Her prayer is granted, and the chrysalis of his soul (or entelachy, as Goethe originally described it, with needless obscurity) passes within. Schumann’s description of Gretchen’s humility is sublime.

All that then remains is for the Chorus Mysticus to sing of the Eternal Feminine which draws us ever onwards, in the famous couplet which ends Goethe’s poem. However, before we hear it, the sympathetic listener will have been raised to a state of appropriate metaphysical receptivity by the intimate arioso sung just before Gretchen makes her entry. Dr Marianus is one of the hermits who people this imagined landscape; he occupies the highest, purest cell, and the object of his worship is indicated by his name. It is a large claim, but his hymn to the Virgin may be the most beautiful ever written.

Such music requires a singer to match. For many years, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was definitive in this role (especially in a celebrated Britten recording of 1972), just as he earned by general consent the title of the finest Lieder baritone since the war. For a long time after his retirement, we scanned the horizon for a successor. Olaf Bär, Wolfgang Holzmair, Matthias Goerne—these have come and gone without challenging for the crown. Now it is time to declare Gerhaher the equal of his great teacher; and in the Marianus music he surpasses him. His rendition of Hier ist die Aussicht frei in the Harnoncourt recording is singing of matchless purity, sensibility and (to use the untranslatable word so applicable to Schumann) Innigkeit. This treasurable artist is a convinced enthusiast for the Scenes from Faust, and those who have the opportunity to do so should go to hear him demonstrate why, or at least conjure him up on Spotify or YouTube, and so immerse themselves in music that, for once, can properly be called heavenly. 

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