“We look forward to seeing you in Palm Beach next season,” the Vienna Philharmonic’s chairman Daniel Froschauer told me at a special gathering after a dress rehearsal of one of the orchestra’s annual concerts at Carnegie Hall. After next year’s routine visit to New York, the Vienna players will decamp to Florida for guest appearances in West Palm Beach and Naples. Much of their American audience now resides in Florida, so these new destinations only make sense. Still, the performances in New York looked to be nearly sold out—a novelty in that fading metropolis these days.
The Vienna Philharmonic’s visits to New York date back to 1956—a fine example of cultural diplomacy in the Cold War world and an enduring tradition. The orchestra is a self-governing body that maintains no permanent music director. Rather, it invites celebrated conductors to lead its performances. Each year, a different one leads it in New York. Last year’s residency at Carnegie Hall spelled trouble for performances scheduled to be led by the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, who has worked closely with Vladimir Putin’s regime, and he was speedily replaced by the Metropolitan Opera’s music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin. This year, the assignment fell to the German conductor Christian Thielemann, director of the Staatskapelle Dresden.
Thielemann is arguably the greatest conductor of his generation in the high German Romantic. His performances of Wagner and Richard Strauss rank among the best and most incisive in recent decades. He famously conducts great masterpieces without the benefit of a score.
Thielemann lived up to his transcendent reputation in all three concerts. The first, which I knew from the final dress rehearsal due to a special invitation, featured Strauss’s monumental Alpine Symphony, a riveting depiction of a nighttime mountain ascent to a radiant dawn. It can be read as the triumph of man over nature—a metaphor that fit with Strauss’ atheism, however much it contrasted with the ethereal nature of his music. Thielemann exploited this contradiction to the fullest.
He did not lose sight of the concert’s other offering, Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, or “Transfigured Night.” We normally regard Schoenberg as an aesthetic rebel. He famously rejected tonality to compose atonal music, in what many regarded as a betrayal of the Western musical tradition. Verklärte Nacht, however, predates this deviation. Perhaps prophetically, it dates from 1899, the final year before the troubled 20th century let loose. A musical expression of an eponymous poem by the Romantic poet Richard Dehmel, it also reflects Schoenberg’s infatuation with the sister of his teacher Alexander von Zemlinsky, whom Schoenbrg married two years later. The poem begins darkly. A young couple walk in the woods at night, where the woman reveals that she bears another man’s child. The transfiguration of mood comes as the man reflects on the situation and decides to accept her anyway, leading her to what we presume is a happy union blessed by life. So movingly did Thielemann lead the work that a friend who joined me abandoned her aversion to Schoenberg then and there.
The visit continued with a duo of symphonies by Felix Mendelssohn and Johannes Brahms. Mendelssohn’s Third Symphony came first, preceded by his brief but colorful Hebrides Overture. Like his Third (known as his “Scottish” symphony), the piece was inspired by a youthful visit to Scotland. That distant land was ground zero for Romantic inspiration. The novels of Sir Walter Scott, mainly set in the Middle Ages, achieved pan-European fame. Shakespeare’s Macbeth enjoyed a continental vogue as his most famous play and inspired Verdi’s transformative operatic adaption. German Romantics took their cues from Friedrich Schiller’s play Mary Stuart, a retelling of the doomed life of Mary, Queen of Scots. The country’s atmosphere flowed through Mendelssohn’s creativity, though he later presented his Third Symphony as sui generis. Nevertheless, its sonata-form movements all contain referents to his youthful travel in the form of Scottish folk music that few observers have ignored.
Thielemann guided the orchestra graciously through the score, which dwells heavily on horns and silvery lines. He adumbrated this approach in Brahms’s Second Symphony, a rare work in the composer’s oeuvre that came easily to him. Brahms’s First Symphony took him nearly twenty years to complete, but the Second unrolled during a pleasant summer in a lakeside resort town. Its colorful and upbeat mood is rather outside Thielemann’s normal repertoire, but he pulled it off with grace and charm.
On tour, Vienna usually encores its concerts with a Strauss dance tune. After this lighter touch in the main program, it seemed only natural to end with the jaunty polka “Mit Extrapost!” by Eduard Strauss, son of the senior Johann Strauss and brother of Johann Strauss II, who composed the famous “Blue Danube” waltz.
The final concert was devoted to just one work—Anton Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony. A behemoth that continues for nearly an hour and a half, it was his final completed work in the genre. Until recently, Bruckner’s works were disfavored. The length and intense chromatism of his symphonies are so challenging that they were long considered impossible or too impractical to perform. The same curse was applied to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which was infamously given 77 rehearsals in Vienna before its court opera abandoned an early attempt to perform it. In a musical landscape saturated by Wagner, Brucker’s repeated and overpowering crescendos, all building from heavy brass sonorities, drew unfavorable comparison because they never really seemed to go anywhere. Indeed, Bruckner’s artistic mentor Hermann Levi—most famous in music history for conducting the premiere of Wagner’s Parsifal—drove his pupil to depression and nearly to suicide by pronouncing his Eighth Symphony unperformable. Bruckner survived to hear it performed in his lifetime—he completed it in 1887, when he was 63, heard its premiere five years later, and then died in 1896, with only three performances having been given.
Bruckner had his champions, however. Contrary to popular belief, it was Bruckner, and not Wagner, who rated as Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer. Famous mid-twentieth century composers like Bruno Walter and Herbert von Karajan also celebrated his work. It was not until around the year 2000, however, that Bruckner’s symphonies became part of the standard canon, in significant part thanks to Pierre Boulez conducting the Eighth with the Vienna Philharmonic. Thielemann’s performance radiated such confidence that it will likely stand the test of time and enter what remains of New York’s cultural memory, which recalls von Karajan leading it in a legendary Carnegie Hall performance in the historic year of 1989.
Josef Strauss, another brother from the famous family, ended this year’s visit in a splendid performance of his waltz Sphärenklänge.
Thielemann is now over sixty but has lost nothing of the energy or poise that New York has admired over the past three decades. By reputation, he is said to be disputatious, a quality that reportedly led to his departure from the Deutsche Oper Berlin and Munich Philharmonic. This may have frustrated other opportunities, as have rumors that he is favorably disposed toward far-right politics, specifically including the Pegida movement, a German organization that opposes Europe’s Islamicization. His contract in Dresden will end in 2024, but greener pastures may yet await him.
