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December 9, 2004
TT: Another country
I just got back from Lincoln Center, where I heard Hilary Hahn play the Elgar Violin Concerto with Sir Colin Davis and the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall. I rarely go to orchestral concerts nowadays--it's been months since I last heard the Philharmonic live, and I only went this time at the urging of a friend--and I was struck anew by how alienated I am from the increasingly tedious experience of traditional classical concertgoing, at least as it's practiced in Manhattan. The ugly hall, the gray acoustics, the snidely knowing intermission chat, the coughing and ill-timed applause and near-complete lack of young faces in the audience: all these depress me so much that I find it hard to push them aside and attend to the music. The first half of the program, Janacek's Taras Bulba and Sibelius' En Saga, was well played, but I simply wasn't there: I pulled my head into my shell and sat it out.Not so the second half. For one thing, Hilary Hahn is an extraordinary artist, far more so than is generally understood, her fast-rising fame notwithstanding. I wrote about her four years ago in Time, whose editors had just dubbed her "America's best young classical musician," a fatuous mass-media plaudit that I did my best to put into some kind of sane perspective:
Yes, classical-music whiz kids are as common as laid-off dot.com executives, but Hilary Hahn is no robotic virtuoso. Her tone is lean and sweet, her interpretations smart and unshowy; even the hardest-boiled prodigy-hating critics in the business go all mushy when she plays Bach, Beethoven, Barber and Bernstein....
Hahn began studying violin at the age of four, entered Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music at 10 and signed an exclusive recording contract with Sony Classical at 16. But she doesn't think of herself as a prodigy. "A prodigy, in my mind, is someone who practices eight hours a day and has a big concert career at 13," she once told a reporter. "That's not my style. I practice maybe half that much, and I've had a pretty normal life."
"Normal" may not be a totally accurate way to describe the life of someone who made her debut with a major orchestra when she was 12 years old. Still, Hahn has a point. The hot glare of big-media publicity can affect prodigies like a sun lamp: first you blossom, then you blister. But this wunderkind has paced her career sensibly, steering clear of the pitfalls that await unformed artists who push themselves (or are pushed) too hard. Now, at 21, she is a fully mature musician with a style all her own....
Listening to Hahn's glowing recording of Samuel Barber's gently poetic Violin Concerto, one has the same feeling of intimacy as if the two of you were having dinner together. Only a very real person--a whole self--can make music that way. Far too many prodigies crash, burn and vanish, but this remarkable young woman seems here to stay.
All this was true enough when I wrote it, but it doesn't come anywhere near describing what I heard a couple of hours ago. Hahn is now a profoundly gifted woman who has somehow retained much of the child prodigy's mystery. Her playing is simple and wholly unaffected, though in no way naïve. Perhaps the right word is transparent: "I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed," Igor Stravinsky once remarked, and that's more or less how Hahn played Elgar this evening. The only thing I can compare it to is the similarly transparent artistry of Dinu Lipatti, the great Rumanian pianist who died absurdly young a half-century ago, leaving behind a dozen-odd recordings whose purity and directness will never be surpassed. To hear such artists is to wonder in vain where their inspiration comes from. Especially when they're young, one feels they might almost be angels, carrying a message they themselves cannot yet fully comprehend.
To hear the Elgar Violin Concerto played in such a way is overwhelming, in part because Sir Edward Elgar was himself a formidably complicated child of the Victorian era whose music reflects the extremes of his scarred psyche. As I wrote earlier this year in Commentary:
He was an artist who longed to be a gentleman, two things that would never be less compatible than at the time and in the place where he lived....
Elgar was born into England's lower middle class, the son of a provincial piano tuner and shopkeeper. Though his exceptional gifts became evident in early childhood, his father could not afford to give the boy a proper musical education. Instead, he became that rarity of rarities, a self-taught classical composer. It was taken for granted that he would become a music teacher and instrumentalist, so he studied violin on a catch-as-catch-can basis, but he did not go to college or attend a conservatory.
Modern-day readers unaware of the peculiarities of Victorian England's classical-music culture are unlikely to appreciate Elgar's situation. Then as now, it was impossible for a classical musician to earn a living solely by composing. Instead, the English musical establishment was dominated by "gentleman composers" with university degrees who taught on the conservatory level. Full-time professional performers, by contrast, were comparable in status to tradesmen, essential but not respectable. The result was an amateur culture that had produced no world-class composers (the last one, Henry Purcell, had died in 1695) and no native-born soloists or conductors of the first rank.
Had Elgar been a different sort of man, he might have responded to these obstacles in a different sort of way--as, for instance, did George Bernard Shaw, an admirer with whom he became friendly in later life. But unlike Shaw, who cared nothing for respectability, Elgar believed that the world owed him both a living and a social position consistent with his talent, and he conducted himself accordingly....
Worldly success had come too late and after too hard a struggle for him to feel secure in his own skin, and though he eventually transformed himself into the very model of a perfect English gentleman, those who knew him best knew better. As late as 1897 he brusquely declined an invitation to an upper-class luncheon party, sending a note informing the hostess that she "would not wish your board to be disgraced by the presence of a piano-tuner's son and his wife."
I wonder what kind of music Elgar would have written had he succeeded in freeing himself from the gentlemanly fetters of his upbringing. I never cease to be delighted by the way a certain kind of English emigrant responds to the expansive tone and temper of American life. Time and again I've heard such folk express their relief in words not greatly different from the ones John Cleese wrote for himself to speak in A Fish Called Wanda:
Wanda, do you have any idea what it's like being English? Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of doing the wrong thing, of saying to someone "Are you married?" and hearing "My wife left me this morning," or saying "Do you have children?" and being told they all burned to death on Wednesday. You see, Wanda, we're all terrified of embarrassment. That's why we're so...dead. Most of my friends are dead, you know, we have these piles of corpses to dinner. But you're alive, God bless you, and I want to be, I'm so fed up with all this!
Might Elgar have been a different composer had he turned his back on the class whose ranks he sought to penetrate? It's impossible to know, for he chose instead to play up and play the game, though the mask of rectitude he wore barely fit and was constantly slipping. To quote again from my Commentary essay: "Elgar was a man in the grip of his own ever-churning emotions. 'English music is white and evades everything,' he wrote. Not so his own music, which mirrored the manic-depressive swings of his temperament as precisely as a fever chart. Within the span of a single piece--even a single movement--he darts from exultation to despair and back again." From one pole to the other: such was his fate. He knew ecstasy, but only for fleeting moments, and the essential quality of a work like the B Minor Violin Concerto is a passionate yet strangely innocent longing that speaks of ultimate unfulfillment. It is in no way surprising to discover that Elgar intended it as a musical portrait of a woman friend with whom he had what appears to have been an intense but unconsummated romance--an amitié amoureuse carried to characteristic extremes.
Such a piece might have been made for an ex-prodigy to play, and just as the sixteen-year-old Yehudi Menuhin recorded it so beautifully that his performance, conducted by the composer, has remained continuously in print ever since 1932, so did Hilary Hahn give a performance tonight so beautiful that I expect to remember it as long as I live. I wept to hear Elgar's unfulfilled yearnings confided from the stage of Avery Fisher Hall with such heartfelt simplicity, and as I walked home in the rain after the concert, I realized with a start that I'd forgotten all about the coughers and chatterers. They might have been a million miles away. Or maybe I was.
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Tonight's program will be repeated on Saturday at eight. For more information, go here.
Posted December 9, 2004 11:16 AM
