Old school titan
In this age of youth, conductors – along with Chinese communist leaders – are the last group for whom advancing years are no obstacle. Kurt Masur, at 71, now holds both London and New York in his baton-free hands, and tonight the Royal Festival Hall receives a rare visit from the 77-year-old Wolfgang Sawallisch and his Philadelphia Orchestra, whose music director he has been since 1993.
Sawallisch is the last of the German opera-house tradition that produced most of the conducting giants of the 20th century – Böhm, Furtwängler, Klemperer, Kleiber. He held his first conducting post at Augsburg in 1947, was a rising star at Bayreuth until he fell out with the dictatorial Wieland Wagner, and ran the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in the 70s and 80s. When he retired from the opera house at the age of 70, he was looking forward to a quieter life – until, that is, Philadelphia offered him the post of music director.
“I had intended to retire in 1993 and enjoy my freedom,” he told me when we met in New York earlier this month, “but the invitation came from Philadelphia and I changed my mind. It was a very difficult decision, but it was an incredible challenge to change not only from operas to concerts but also to change continents, from Europe to America, to learn a new language, and to come to terms with a new system [patronage rather than subsidy]. It was the right decision.”
The Philadelphia Orchestra, which is celebrating its centenary this year, is one of the traditional “big five” in the US, along with the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Boston Symphony and the Cleveland Orchestra, though plenty of other cities (notably Los Angeles, San Francisco, St Louis and Baltimore) would dispute that the term still has validity. Philadelphia’s great reputation was founded under Leopold Stokowski and cemented during the 44-year tenure of the Hungarian-born Eugene Ormandy, who established the intense, highly refined “Philadelphia sound” and made more than 400 recordings with the orchestra.
Ormandy, like Toscanini, Klemperer and Karajan, was a musical giant on a scale that present-day conductors can only dream of. They caught a moment when there was a great longing for classical music, and the means – the development of the record industry – by which that audience could be reached.
“In 1947, when I started my conducting career,” says Sawallisch, “Germany and the whole world was in ruins. We had to rebuild society, and at this time music was an incredible part of life. After a long day spent working, people were hungry to be in another world. For two or three hours they forgot reality and were happy to be confronted with the world of the arts. Today all this is over – life goes so much faster but we live life less deeply. We live with the music, but we don’t live for the music.”
It is a nice irony that the hotel in which Sawallisch and I are talking is playing Bach as background music, reducing the master to Muzak. “We take music as consumers,” he says. “Whereas it used to be an essential part of life, now it is taken for granted.”
This makes Sawallisch sound like a curmudgeon harping on about the glories of the past, classical music’s answer to Freddie Trueman. But he is far from that: he is willing to adapt, has been instrumental in winning the battle to get a new hall for the orchestra in Philadelphia (which will open next year), has a sense of humour, and doesn’t moan too bitterly when we drag him off to Central Park and prop him up against a tree for the photograph. You can’t imagine Toscanini agreeing to that.
When I met him, Sawallisch was clutching the plans for the $200m venue. “The orchestra has been looking for a new concert hall for 80 years,” he says. “There are letters from Stokowski in the 1920s when he was fighting for a new hall without any success, and Ormandy fought for 44 years for the money for a new hall.”
The fact that the battle has finally been won is the upside; the downside is that the orchestra no longer has a recording contract: EMI cancelled it a couple of years ago as part of the downsizing of the classical recording industry. The orchestra, which needs to have a presence in the record shops beyond Ormandy’s back catalogue, plans to respond by making its own recordings, a trend that is sure to grow as new technology transforms distribution methods.
Sawallisch, who recorded a Beethoven cycle with the Concertgebouw, would now like another crack at it with his Philadelphians. Karajan, he points out, did four cycles, and Klemperer re-recorded the Beethoven symphonies with almost his final breath. “Beethoven is such an incredibly modern composer that every month, every week, every day, you have new ideas about interpretation.” After more than 50 years as a conductor – a lifetime spent living for the music – he has surely earned it.
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