by Janet Wasserman
"The Opening Night Gala of Carnegie Hall's 111th Season" reads the cover of the gala journal distributed with the evening's program. This was possibly the saddest gala in recent memory, with the evening dedicated to a double loss -- first and foremost, to those lost in the September 11 World Trade Center calamity. Eleven days later, on September 22, the renowned violinist Isaac Stern died. Isaac Stern was the champion and savior of this building, which was doomed to be demolished. We sat in the auditorium now named for him.
I went to see and hear Thomas Quasthoff, as the guest artist with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Claudio Abbado. We got more than we expected. After the opening remarks by the Board Chairman, there was Irving Berlin's anthem, God Bless America, sung by a fine tenor, Daniel Rodriguez, who is a member of the New York City Police Department. At the final refrain, the audience joined in the singing. Following this was the surprise appearance of the Mayor of New York City, Rudolf Giuliani, whose remarks included his heartfelt appreciation for the presence of the orchestra in these trying times. And last was the fact that Maestro Abbado is in his final season with the orchestra. Each one of these items was met with thunderous applause. It was obvious from the audience's responses that the occasion was one on which to demonstrate the vibrancy of New York's music season and the solidarity of New Yorkers in the face of unimaginable tragedy.
The evening then proceeded to its program, opening with Beethoven's Egmont Overture. Since the orchestra played the overture with the reduced forces appropriate to the Overture's scoring; we did not see the full orchestral complement until Quasthoff appeared. I sensed that the mood of the evening had some effect on Quasthoff's rendition of songs from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn. He seemed somewhat less ebullient, although being the superb artist he is, he always acts appropriately to the words. Quasthoff opened with Revelge (Reveille), which he sang with vigor using the deeper and darker tones of his voice to convey the shattering sense of impending loss. In Revelge he demonstrated the marvelous range he has, reaching effortlessly for the higher notes. I have always thought it possible that this Mahler song, with its blare and mocking stridency, could be considered an anti-war piece. Quasthoff again gave us a fierce and bitter interpretation of the words in his singing and his demeanor. He had the marvelous support of the Berliners. There seems to be a great natural affinity between the singer, conductor, and musicians. The BPO played with great warmth and clarity, especially notable in the strings and wind.
The next song was Lob des hohen Verstandes (Praise from a Lofty Intellect). Here again I felt that Quasthoff was more subdued in this song than on previous times when I heard him sing Mahler live in concert as well as on his CD of the Des Knaben Wunderhorn. I wondered as I listened if it was the overall mood of the city on this occasion that produced these impressions on me. I cannot really say for certain, yet I have been to enough Quasthoff concerts to trust my impressions here, especially after having seen him sing a full program following a brief illness and hospitalization. Quasthoff's final hee-haw in the Lob des hohen Verstandes was less boisterous and less cynical than I am used to hearing from him. With Der Tamboursg'sell (The Drummer Boy) the military mood of Revelge returned. Quasthoff sang this with appealing sadness. In the program's last Wunderhorn song, Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt (St. Anthony of Padua's Sermon to the Fish), Quasthoff sang this rollicking tale of a sermon preached in futility. It seems to me that an audience that does not understand German, and in the darkened auditorium cannot read the texts provided in the program, loses the full measure of this insinuating and cynical song. The final song -- what I truly waited to hear -- was Mahler's renunciatory Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (I Am Lost to the World) -- a farewell to life -- in its orchestral version. Quasthoff sang it with piercing tenderness. Throughout his appearance tonight, Quasthoff was in fine voice, demonstrating the full range and power of his dark bass-baritone, which he easily lightens in his upper range, and his always-present artistic intelligence.
As a footnote to this last Mahler song, I refer to two articles that appeared in the Wiener Zeitung, on September 12 and October 17 of last year. The first article announces that the autograph manuscript of the orchestral version of Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, thought to be irretrievably lost since World War II, had been offered for auction in Sotheby's Vienna branch for upwards of eight figures in Austrian Schillings.
On October 17, another report appeared (as excerpted here) in the Wiener Zeitung:
... The manuscript was given as a present to the Austrian-Jewish music-historian Guido Adler by Gustav Mahler, a close friend, on the occasion of Adler's 50th birthday in 1905. ... the grandson and heir of Guido Adler, has demanded that the manuscript be returned to his family. The present owner of the manuscript, a Viennese lawyer ... said that he would only be prepared to return the manuscript 'if it could be proved that my father acquired it illegally.'
...
Most of Guido Adler's library was confiscated by the Nazis in the November pogroms of 1938. The majority of this was discovered in Austria's Nationalbibliothek after the war and was returned to the Adler family.
Imbedded in this musical evening memorializing painfully sad occasions -- one of unspeakable cruelty -- is yet another text, bespeaking greed, betrayal, and inhumanity. Plus ça change...
by Ann Partridge
I quite cheerfully made a deal with my concert-going friend in early September. He wished to attend Wozzeck at the Met, which I had heard many years before while in college and found excruciating. I had previously promised not to make him go hear any Mahler and had been bemoaning the fact that Quasthoff would be in town in October singing - Mahler. So of course I agreed to go hear Wozzeck (which was fantastic - I guess my tastes have changed a little in twenty-odd years) and promptly got on the phone to see if it was still possible to get tickets for Carnegie Hall. I managed to get a pair for the second-to-last row at the very top of the hall.
A week later I was in my office checking my morning e-mail, when my boss's brother ran in white-faced with alarm and yelling that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center. No one needs to know the details of yet another story of September 11, except that I wound up taking care of my sister's children while she was setting up a field hospital in Liberty State Park. I was limited to the Disney channel and spent the day listening to cheerful Winnie the Pooh ditties while wondering whether my concert-going companion, who works in lower Manhattan, was dead or alive. Fortunately he turned up, unscathed but shaken, around mid-afternoon. He had witnessed the buildings' collapse from about fifteen blocks away and managed to hitch a ride home with a friend who had a car.
More than three weeks later, as we were stopped in Lincoln Tunnel traffic, wondering if the tunnel would reopen in time for us to make it to Carnegie, we could look across the river and see the smoke still rising. Me, "You can see it against those red buildings." My friend, "The red that you see is a special hanging that they put up because those buildings are more or less shells with the windows blown out. It keeps debris from falling."
I'm not sure how many people Carnegie Hall seats, but I do know that every person I have spoken to for the past three weeks has had a story to tell. Most of them have been far, far grimmer than mine. Everyone in the audience at Carnegie Hall brought a story to the concert. Everyone.
This was not - and could not be - a night that centered around the soloist. Quasthoff appeared sensitive to this and his performance was all the more beautiful because of his blending in rather than dominating.
The concert was a long one, and for most of it Quasthoff was not on stage. Before Quasthoff came on, Police Officer Daniel Rodriquez sang "God Bless America" unaccompanied and with the audience on its feet from beginning to end, the Mayor of New York City, Rudoph Giuliani, gave a speech, and Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic performed a vigorous Egmont Overture. Quasthoff did not appear at all during the second half of the concert, which was the Eroica Symphony followed by an orchestral encore.
Everything about the evening was moving. The orchestra's performance, with and without Quasthoff, was vigorous and sensitive at the same time. I found myself sitting up there in the rafters hearing all sorts of tone colors that are normally hidden in lesser orchestras - a little flute color over an army of strings or brass, for instance.
When Quasthoff performed he did not distract from this. Instead he worked with it to great effect. His voice carried clearly and easily to our distant seats, but was at all times a part of the music, completely responsive to the variety of Mahler's orchestral colors and moods and to the difficult experiences that we had all brought to the hall with us that night.
He performed four songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Revelge, Lob des hohen Verstandes, Der Tamboursg'sell and Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt and one song from Rückert-Lieder: Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen. Of course I wish he had performed a dozen more (maybe two dozen?), but have to admit that he covered a lot of ground in his choices of songs. Most of it was hard ground too, as was appropriate for the occasion. Revelge and Der Tamboursg'sell both deal directly with the horrors of war and death and are uncompromising in both text and musical setting. It's taking me unaccustomed hours to write this because I do not have a hope of describing the quality of horror when Quasthoff was singing "tralali, tralalei, tralala" with an eerie piccolo accompaniment. There is a wonderful quotation of Mahler in the program notes for the concert:
"I know that as far as I can shape an inner experience in words, I certainly would not write any music about it. My need to express myself musically and symphonically starts only where the dark emotions begin, at the door leading to the 'other world,' the world in which things are not any more separated by time and place."
There was indeed an otherworldly quality about this performance and a breakdown in time and place between the mind of the composer and the people of the audience years after his death, on another continent, mourning for five thousand people still buried in smoking rubble. What, really, can I say about the performers who were the intermediaries in this?
Lob des hohen Verstandes and Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt also shared in the otherworldly quality. Lob des hohen Verstandes, a fable of a donkey judging between the merits of a nightingale's song and a cuckoo's, is full of broad humor - cuckoo effects, clarinet squeaks, an enormous braying hee-haw at the end. Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt is about a sermon presented to fish who enjoy it enormously and then go on with their lives completely unchanged by it. The stupidities portrayed in these songs showed up starkly against the background of the evening, so that there was again a sort of horror in living in a world undeniably containing donkeys and cuckoos as well as death.
The final song of the evening Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen was as movingly sung as anything I have ever heard. Such a sad, gentle quality about it, quiet and reflective. As Quasthoff sang it, this retreat from the world of stupidity and death delicately led not to a heaven alone, but one that all of us briefly shared together.
As we left New York, the smoke was clearer than ever against the brilliant city lights, but there was also a little of heaven in the lingering memory of the evening's music.