SOLIDARITY - and why Hans Sachs was right

The LPO and Vladimir Jurowski, filmed at Glyndebourne and introduced by Martin the Chairman, play 'Solider of Orange' in solidarity with our arts friends in the Netherlands, where culture is being threatened with excision by a government that's crucially propped up by Geert Wilders and his far-right "Freedom Party". Orchestras around the world are moving to show their solidarity. The anthem is an underground song from the Second World War. On the stage you can glimpse the Meistersinger set.

It's time to ditch the universal shudder, by the way, at the words of Hans Sachs about the vitality of German art. He is not prefiguring the Nazis when he declares that even if Germany were to be under foreign rule, the German people will still have their great art. He is saying that art is what keeps a nation's sense of identity alive. He is right. The opera is set in Germany and Sachs was a German poet - so of course he's talking about German art. But it is true for every nation and every culture and it is something we forget at our peril. An artistic output of which a country can be proud - great art that shows individuals giving the best of their own spirits to everyone else - takes years, decades, centuries to build. But it can be destroyed overnight. Shame on Wilders and those philistine thugs.

Meeting some Prince Charmings

I had a merry old time meeting Prince Charming last week. Actually, two Prince Charmings. First, the ace British mezzo Alice Coote, who plays the P.C. in Massenet's Cendrillon to the Cinderella of Joyce DiDonato at the Royal Opera House, opening next week. In today's Independent, she talks to me about duetting with another mezzo, how the great Brigitte Fassbaender helped her to get up and running, and why singing is a matter of ups and downs. Sometimes both at once.

My other P.C. is the American tenor James Valenti, who has sung with Gheorghiu and Netrebko and is soon to be plastered all over the world's cinemas in 3D as Pinkerton in the ROH's Madama Butterfly - not the most princely or charming of roles, admittedly. Here's the short-and-sweet interview in the Observations section of the Indy's Arts & Books today. The show opens tomorrow. (Apologies to the wonderful couple at Garsington the other day who gently corrected us over our picnic. "It's not a show. It's an opera...")

But a nice little addendum is that when I dropped in after the rehearsal, James was still feeling astonished to find himself in the same dressing room at the ROH used by such luminaries as Ben Heppner, Jonas Kaufmann and Simon Keenlyside. He says he took a photo of the list on the door and put it on Facebook: "Part of me’s still this kid from New Jersey! What am I doing here?" 

It turns out, too, that the soprano stepping in at short notice for the ailing Patricia Racette, who would have been Butterfly, is Kristine Opolais - aka Mrs Andris Nelsons as of 29 April. 

 

Roll over, Amadeus?

Is this how Mozart really died? A musical thriller landed on my desk the other week. In Mozart's Last Aria, by Matt Rees, the sleuth is Nannerl Mozart; the death she's investigating is that of her beloved brother. It's a cracking read. Matt, based in Jerusalem, is a well-established crime fiction author and a former foreign correspondent who covered, amongst other things, the second Intifada on location. Why, then, did he want to write a detective story on ground that had already been so powerfully claimed by Peter Shaffer? I asked him for an e-interview... First, here's the trailer:

JD: Matt, what made you want to write a detective story about Mozart's death? Especially after 'Amadeus' has had the market cornered for so many years?

MR: Peter Schaffer’s great play was written in the late Seventies. Milos Forman filmed it in the early Eighties. Which is getting to be rather a long time ago (though as I prepare to turn 44, I’d rather not admit that…) In turn, Schaffer’s play was a reworking of an old piece by Pushkin, which Mussorgsky later used as the basis for an opera. Yet there’s a great deal of new historical research on Mozart which gives tantalizing hints about his possible death and the reasons behind it – including the secret police infiltration of the Masons, of which Wolfgang was a leading member, and even his involvement in espionage. The Pushkin-Schaffer idea is based on a single confession of murder Salieri made – and later recanted – in a madhouse. I wanted to use this new historical research to come up with a new story about Mozart’s death. I certainly think readers have a deep fascination with Mozart which will make them open to a reexamination of the story of his demise. Most of all, I wanted to put his relationship with his sister Nannerl – the narrator of my novel – at the heart of the story. It was she who gave me the idea for the book, when I visited St. Gilgen, her little village in the Salzkammergut, the mountains near Salzburg. I saw an image of her in which she looked exactly like her brother. Naturally, that got my crime fiction juices bubbling…

JD: Do you think this really is what happened to Mozart?

MR: I do. When I put together all the latest historical research, I found it pointed toward the very thing that happens in my novel. Even research which at first contravenes my theory – such as the medical evidence that Mozart died of progressive kidney failure – turns out to be consistent with the effects of the way I have him dying. Certainly my reading of The Magic Flute adds, for me, another element of evidence which, when you put it together with the philosophy Mozart espoused in his letters, is very compelling. Of course, my novel is fiction and it’s my theory – not my absolute contention – that Mozart died this way. I hope that readers will find the novel generates their own ideas about what might truly have happened and that it’ll also make them look again at the music Mozart wrote in the shadow of sudden death. I heard all that great music – The Magic Flute, the Requiem, etc. – as if for the first time once I looked into the new historical research. I hope readers will have that experience too.

JD: How do you feel about taking liberties with real historical figures - eg (without giving the plot away) one character who is dramatically murdered in the course of the story, but in reality lived a long and distinguished life?

MR: I made sure that all the major characters – figures like Nannerl, Wolfgang’s wife Constanze, Baron Swieten, Police Minister Pergen – conformed to historical fact in the way the novel plays out. But I decided I could play with some of the minor characters, given that this is a novel. In the case of the fellow to which you refer, he did end up with a distinguished position, but as far as I can tell he remained a perpetual rogue (for which I rather admire him) and would entirely have approved of my misusing him.

JD: You decided to base the book's structure on the Mozart Piano Sonata in A minor - can you tell us a little more about why and how you did this? How problematic was it? Did it bother you that it might interfere with the genre's structural demands? How well do you feel it works?

MR: The A minor sonata is a response to a death. Mozart was in Paris on tour with his mother when she died. He wrote the sonata there. It has the disturbance of loss in its opening movement, then it examines that loss in the second, contemplative movement, and it resolves the loss in the final movement. That very much mirrors the structure of a crime novel. The “murder” followed by the investigation, and finally the revelation of what truly lay behind the killing. The primary function of using this sonata for the book, in terms of the writing, was that I was able to create a mood in my head as a I wrote. When I was writing the early part of the book, the jarring first movement was running in my head. The same with the other movements as the book progressed. It gave an energy to the writing with which I believe I was able to imbue the story. I got the idea from a concert pianist friend who said she visualizes a particular colour when she plays a particular piece of music, thus bringing herself to an emotional state matching the music. She isn’t just tapping on the right keys. So I tried it and I found it gave me a strong emotional connection to what I was writing – and maintaining that connection is much of the battle for a novelist, who has to write every day for months. It can’t just be inspiration; you need a repeatable technique you can tap into every day.

JD: Please tell us something about how you researched the book? And did you encounter resistance/skepticism/snobbery towards the idea from any quarters while so doing?

MR: As a writer of four previous crime novels, I’m accustomed to the snobbery of people who think (without ever reading any crime novels) that this isn’t literature. But I did wonder if there’d be an additional element here, in that classical musicians might doubt the project’s ability to represent the complexity of the music. However, the musicians I approached to help me write about the music allowed me to examine their performance process and to discuss performance during Mozart’s period. Now I like to think that’s because I’m such a winning, intelligent fellow, but I also expect that it’s because Mozart is such an absorbing subject for anyone with an interest in music or history that any doubts about the book’s supposed genre were immediately overcome.

My research also included learning the piano, which helped me get inside the structure of Wolfgang’s music, and listening to Mozart, Mozart, Mozart. Neither of these things was a hardship. Nor was repeated visits to Vienna, Salzburg, and the mountains nearby, where Mozart’s sister lived her married life.

As for potential resistance: researching my Palestinian novels was much more troublesome. People used to threaten me and hold guns on me in Nablus and Gaza. Classical music historians are softies in comparison.

JD: Do you have a musical background yourself? And do you think you'll return to the world of music for future novels?

MR: I play very little classical music, though I did re-learn piano to write this novel. I had lessons as a child, but I gave up the piano in favour of guitar as a teenager. I’ve played in a number of rock and alternative bands. When I lived in New York, I was a regular at CBGB’s, where I trod the same boards as The Police, Blondie and Elvis Costello. This has proved to me that I’m rather a mediocre musician, which only makes me more fascinated with Mozart who….wasn’t. The book I just delivered to my publisher is about the mysterious end of the great Italian artist Caravaggio, so I’m staying with the idea of historical mysteries about artists. I do think there’ll be more music in my forthcoming novels and I have a couple of mysterious stories concerning great composers in mind. They were fairly unpredictable types, and that makes them just right for crime fiction.

JD: Last, just one little thing that confused me: the title! I kept waiting for there to be a 'last aria', but the crucial piece is a piano sonata...did someone change your title for you?

MR: Aha, but the Mozart of the book’s title isn’t Wolfgang! It’s Nannerl, his sister – although we don’t know that at first. And so, without giving away the ending, I’ll say that the aria that’s heard in the Epilogue is the one to which the book’s title refers. You’re right that publishers do like to change titles and several of my books have been published under titles I didn’t initially choose. But in this case Mozart’s Last Aria is the title I used almost from the start.

"Mitsuko Uchida played for this milk"

 In this weekend's news:

Valentina Nafornita from Moldova won BBC Cardiff Singer of the World, though there was much stronger support on Twitter for Olesya Petrova and Andrei Bondarenko ("the name's Bond...arenko, Andrei Bondarenko...") for the performances yesterday. Valentina may have excelled in earlier rounds, and scooped the audience prize as well. But in the final she showed a lack of stamina and uncertain intonation. Nevertheless, she is thin, pretty, young and saleable. We wonder why anyone bothered with the singing.

'Max', aka Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen's Music, has called for fines to be imposed on audience members whose phones go off during performances. As I can report that the LPO fines its players £5 a pop if a phone rings in rehearsal and £20 in a concert, we don't see why the audience should be exempt. It works. In 15 years I've only heard one orchestral phone jangle during full flood. Go get 'em, Max!

In Moscow, the Tchaikovsky Competition is in full swing. Barry Douglas, piano supremo and jury boss - himself a former winner - is tweeting updates. Follow him at @wbarrydouglas.

Here, I'm off for my first visit to Garsington Opera's new home at Wormsley near High Wycombe this afternoon. Yes, dear reader, I am attending a real, live baroque opera - a little-known job by good old Vivaldi. More of that anon.

And finally... welcome to Konzertmilch Dortmund. Perhaps this could only happen in Germany, where classical music is still daily bread...

Brahms for Father's Day

Father's Day is sad for those of us who've lost our dads. But it's also a beautiful reason to play you, in my Dad's memory, part of his favourite symphony. Dad, who died of cancer in 1996 aged 67, used to spend many happy hours in his armchair on Sunday afternoons listening to different recordings of this work and comparing them. If anyone in the family should have been a music critic, it was him. So here are Wilhelm Furtwangler and the Vienna Philharmonic in 1945 in Brahms's Symphony No.2. This is the first installment - for the rest, click through to Youtube and follow the links. I'm off to find my hanky.