Out of the past

I was in Tower Records the other day, and they were playing the opening chorus of what turned out to be the Klemperer recording of Bach's B Minor Mass. It was slow and massive, moving (if it could be said to move at all) without a trace of what we now understand to be Baroque rhythm. Nobody, I think, could do Bach that way today. Some people would laugh, others would groan.

Then, later the same day, I was listening to a 1955 Charles Munch recording of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, and could barely believe the liner notes. They were by Louis Biancolli, who back then the music critic of the New York World-Telegram and Sun (and, as it happened, a friend of my parents). I could barely believe what I was reading:

In the heart of every music-lover there is a cherished place for the "Pastoral" Symphony of Beethoven. Should some malign occult power ever banish it from our midst, it would leave an aching void in the artistic consciousness of the world. Ever since its premiere in 1808, the "Pastoral" has been the great revelation of Nature in music. To it have come those seeking refreshment and strength and escape. Here, for some precious forty minutes, they have found a healing power for the torment of spirit and the stress of daily living. Those who have learned to love every measure of this monument to the outdoors have come to cherish still more the message of profound solace and beauty that Beethoven gleaned from the smiling face of Nature.

 

And this is as it should be — and as Beethoven willed it. For him Nature was more than a seasonal pageantry of marvels to hear and to see; in the gathering turmoil and turbulence of the years it had become the great healer, the center of repose, the confidante. Flowers, clouds, running brooks, forests of firs, rolling vistas of green spoke to this troubled pilgrim of the countryside. At times it was of man they spoke, of his immemorial dream of world brother­hood and love; at more sublime moments they were the very voice of God. "What sovereignty in a forest like this!" he exclaims. "On the heights there is rest — to serve Him."

And so on. Nobody -- at least nobody with any prominence -- would write like that today. Anyone who did would be laughed out of the business faster than someone who conducted Bach like Klemperer.

And yet haven't we lost something? What Klemperer and Biancolli have in common is conviction, and above all deep and honest feeling. Music matters to them. You can groan at Klemperer's remorseless, heavy pace, but when the main theme shows up in the bass, it's so huge and deep that it seems to rise from the depths of the earth. Maybe that's not something Bach ever dreamed of (though didn't his organ pedals go down to the lowest depths?), but it's powerful. You can smile, or wince, at Biancolli's gushing, but doesn't he try, at least, to touch the powerful emotion in the piece? And simply by trying (and doing a decent, if old-fashioned job of it), doesn't he come about a thousand miles closer to the real Beethoven than all the careful scholarly, historical, analytical, and (the new trend) lightly anecdotal notes we're getting now?