Do you ever get tired of all the emphasis in the classical music world on how sublime everything is?
“Epic music… intimate sound” goes the tag line for one major orchestra’s season, while the conductor stands, arms raised like a prophet, head thrown back, transfixed by his own greatness. So-and-so’s performances have “captivated” audiences “around the world,” we are told on another orchestra’s website. Such-and-such symphony has “thrilled” generations of listeners. Every concert gets a standing ovation.
It's enough to give you a complex. If you don’t walk out of the hall every time in a blissful trance, on the verge of speaking in tongues, you must be a cretin.
Now I love a transforming concert as much as the next guy. But sometimes a concert is just a concert. If I'm honest, one Haydn symphony sounds pretty much like another to me. Franz Liszt and Richard Strauss kinda bore me. Some classical music is great, some is really good, some is okay, and some is just plain snooze material.
Sometimes the emperor’s just wearing jeans.
Listen to classical radio for a while and you’ll hear a Top 40 hit parade of longhair music by dead white guys. (A station manager once told me, “I’m not in the classical music business, I’m in the radio business.”) The emphasis is on the peppy, frisky, and happy. Lots of sewing machine Baroque and early classical – and nothing that doesn’t quickly resolve! Good stuff, mostly – but is it all sublime? Not by me.
And not everyone is going to agree on the sublime and the mundane. For example, I happen to think Beethoven really is sublime (usually) and Tchaikovsky really isn’t (usually). Beethoven’s music is multi-layered, a subtlety that unpeels like an onion layer by layer, an appreciation that grows and evolves with each listening. With Tchaikovsky, the epic comes in a can. As Aaron Copland once observed, it’s basically the same experience every time you listen.
Don’t get me wrong; I finally came to appreciate Tchaikovsky, after disdaining him for years. He’s a far better tunesmith than Beethoven, really. I love Swan Lake, R & J, Sleeping Beauty, and even Nutcracker (though I avoid it at Christmas). I just don’t think it qualifies as sublime. And that’s okay.
Wagner, to me, belongs to the same ilk, only more so. It’s canned sublimity, but what a can! When I listen to Wagner, I know I’m being emotionally manipulated; I just don’t care.
Mahler? Now he’s the real thing. Harvey Felder said Mahler is his favorite composer. My wife adores him too. In my youth I found him ponderous and long-winded. As an adult I’ve come to appreciate his genius… though once in a while I wish he’d just mellow out and go have a beer.
Brahms? I’m not a big fan. Maybe my ears haven’t discovered him yet, but I suspect he’s one of those composers whose music (like some kinds of jazz) is way more fun to play than to listen to.
At the Tacoma Symphony Orchestra, we recently played Schubert’s Symphony No. 9, the “Great” C Major. I listened to a recording of it a few weeks in advance of the concert cycle, to help get my ears around it. I knew the coda very well, from an old Boston Pops album of my father’s, but didn’t remember the rest of it at all.
In all honesty, after listening to it I still liked the coda, but the rest of it didn’t live up to the “Great” subtitle. After hearing the TSO perform it live in February, I like it better, but I haven’t revised my opinion. I’m certainly glad we programmed it, and I thought the TSO played it extremely well. But what I hear is a painfully self-conscious composer who couldn't get Beethoven out of his ears (perhaps not surprisingly, since Ludwig van had just completed his Earth-shattering "Choral" Symphony). Schubert may well have written some great pieces, but for me, the 9th wasn’t one of them.
On the other hand, one of the New York Times critics recently rated it one of the top pieces of all time – so there you go.
The long and short of it? Just because it’s classical doesn’t mean it’s great. Just because someone else says it’s great doesn’t mean you have to like it. Not every concert has to be a mystical experience. Sometimes it’s just entertainment.
When terms like “sublime,” and “great,” and “thrilling” get tossed around as if they apply equally to all classical music, I think they lose their meaning. We risk turning off those who come to our concerts and don’t experience it that way. Worse, we might even prevent them from trusting their own ears and valuing their own tastes. And there could be no bigger disservice to them, to us, and to music.
Yes, sometimes the emperor is dressed in ceremonial robes, and sometimes -- like the one in the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale -- he’s wearing nothing.
But sometimes, he might really just be wearing jeans.