Passion player
In most of the media coverage of Anne-Sophie Mutter, she comes over as a cross between Jerry Hall, Mother Teresa and Jascha Heifitz, a blend of beauty, compassion and artistry. I was determined, when we met in Vienna this week, to probe beneath this hagiographical sheen, fearlessly to find her flaws. But I’m afraid I failed miserably: it’s all true.
To watch Mutter perform – here it was her old signature piece, the Beethoven violin concerto – is mesmerising. She seems to breathe as the music breathes; her constant movement mirrors its progression: she gives a dynamic, questioning performance, more wilful and spontaneous than she used to produce with her mentor, Herbert von Karajan, who propelled her to fame as a 13-year-old.
Too questioning, some say. Critics have argued that she is now imposing herself on the music to an excessive degree: her recent recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, played with lightning tempos, had a mixed response, as did her Grammy-winning recording of the Beethoven sonatas with her long-time recital partner, Lambert Orkis, which one admirer described as “not for the faint-hearted”.
Mutter is now at an age, 36, when she enjoys dividing the critics; she has the self-belief to make music her way. “We are living in a time when young musicians are very often trained to be indifferent,” she says, “and we have many young musicians who are indeed playing indifferently. They play it right and they play it beautifully, but there is no individuality. Risk taking and the personal spark make a great artist. That makes you hated or loved, and nothing in between.
“Everyone is entitled to my own opinion … sorry, to their own opinion,” she laughs. “That’s fine with me, but the opinion I am defending on stage is an opinion that is well based, well thought through, and that I have come to after living with a piece for 20 years or more.” This is not said arrogantly. She insists on her right to interpret the music, but she does not claim that hers is the only possible interpretation: what she detests is the slick, the bland, the pursuit of technical perfection for its own sake.
“You need to be a rounded human being to be a musician,” she says. “The problem today is the speed at which players have to develop. Where there is no time, the seed of curiosity is not going to grow. Sometimes I’m really shocked when I ask a young colleague whether they know the letters of Mozart or the letters of Brahms and Joachim – standard stuff – and they have never heard of them. With that kind of lame mind, we’re going to hear a lame performance – there is no spark, no understanding of the man behind the music.
“I like the idea of giving the artist the capacity to make decisions: not just in terms of colour but when to start a certain phrase. It is a little like improvising. It is unpredictable and it forces the orchestra to listen. Recently I was playing Mozart with an orchestra and without a conductor and I had to announce every little thing. After an hour of me announcing everything and them writing it down, I made a little speech basically saying that that was the rehearsal but the concert would be different.
“This is music – living art that has to be rebuilt every evening. I’m not going to give them a guarantee that in bar 78 this or that is going to happen; they have to listen and come with me. There was dead silence and they were pretty fed up with me, but in the evening it was wonderful because they got the message. I’m not going to make it easy and glue them to the score; they have to be glued to what they hear.”
Next week, we will have the chance to judge the increasingly liberated Mutter when she begins the UK leg of her Back to the Future tour – a series of five concerts in 10 days at London’s Barbican Centre which includes many of the 20th century’s greatest works for violin, including concertos by Sibelius, Berg and Penderecki. She played the programmes in New York in January and, after London, will take them to Frankfurt and Stuttgart.
It is an epic undertaking that began life as a conversation between Mutter and the conductor Kurt Masur. “It was one of those deadly afternoons,” she says. “Kurt and I have now sworn to each other that we will never decide repertoire in an afternoon, only after a performance when we are tired and reasonably realistic. We felt dynamic and had perhaps had a glass of wine. We wanted to impress each other and this is the result. I think he is very impressed; I certainly am.”
She has described this lengthy exploration of contemporary repertoire as a “voyage into a strange country” – exhausting but hugely satisfying. “The last century has been the most diverse and the most exciting ever for the violin,” she says. “These are very subjectively selected pieces. It doesn’t make sense to construct a festival around pieces that you admire but don’t really adore. You would go crazy; there is so much repertoire there. You can only do it if you really love it; otherwise it’s going to kill you. It’s going to kill me anyhow, but at least I will die happily.”
Mutter seems increasingly to favour large projects over one-off concerts. She toured the Beethoven sonatas with Orkis in 1998 and then recorded them. Next year she plans to play the Mozart concertos with a hand-picked group of players from the Vienna Philharmonic and, when she is content, that too will eventually find its way on to disc.
As with the recent disc of the Four Seasons, recorded with the Trondheim Soloists, there will be no conductor. This is ensemble playing, with Mutter “coaching” rather than conducting. “It will be a tremendous challenge for me to do the Mozart concertos without a conductor,” she says. “I will have to re-study the score from a very different angle: I will have to learn things like horn keys – things you would never learn as a soloist.”
But she has no plans to follow the modern trend for soloists to develop conducting careers. “Coaching from the violin is possible; conducting a large symphony orchestra is a different cup of tea [she has a neat line in English colloquialisms]. It’s great if you can do it and you have enough time to really study, but it’s wrong to do it on the side. It’s obnoxious to imply that just because you are a good instrumentalist you can do anything.”
In any case, time is one thing she doesn’t have. She has two young children and refuses to leave them for long periods – “One is always cut in two halves,” she says. When she played in the US earlier this year, they came out to spend time with her. “I would never be separated from them for more than a week,” she says. “A week is something they can count on their little hands; that is an amount of time they can live with.”
Mutter, who lives with her children in Munich, refuses to speak about her private life. Her marriage in 1989 to Detlef Wunderlich, who was a good deal older than her, and the split it caused with her family, created a media sensation in Germany and left her feeling bruised and bitter. Wunderlich died in 1995 and Mutter is bringing up their children, a boy and girl, alone.
She took a year off from performing in 1990, when her daughter was born, and plans another sabbatical in the second half of this year. “When you look at the schedule you often overlook the fact that you don’t just want to rehearse every day: you want to hang out with the kids, go to the cinema. But the more you are in the mill, the less time you have to study.”
She has already cut her concert schedule from around 120 a year to 80, and plans to reduce it still further. “I would like to play 50 to 60 concerts a year: that would be enough to give me a presence worldwide but would also give me time to study.”
Next year, as well as playing the Mozart concertos, she will record the Beethoven violin concerto with Masur and the New York Philharmonic, the first time she has recorded it since she was a teenager. Much of her repertoire on disc dates back to her collaboration with Karajan, and, as she says half seriously, “My youth’s sins are screaming at me.”
She never listens to her old recordings; when she re-recorded the Four Seasons she made a point of not playing the old disc because she thought she might consciously react against it on the new one. “I didn’t want to put myself in a position where I felt I needed to do something different just for the sake of it,” she says. “I know there is a development; I don’t know whether it is better or worse, but it is very different. I know more than 20 years ago, though once you know more you also doubt more. It’s a strange balance.”
The great influences on her musical life were Karajan, the Swiss conductor Paul Sacher, and her teacher Aida Stucki, who she says taught her to “reason” and to defend her interpretation. But Mutter is now entirely her own woman and her own artist, much changed by marriage and motherhood. “What you see today is not Sacher and not Karajan and not my teacher but me.”
“The older you get, the more you want to have an overlook, to come to grips with things,” she says. “Maybe it’s the mountain climber in me that likes to stand on the peak and sum it up.” The other great peak she is eyeing is the late Beethoven string quartets, though she worries who she would find to play second fiddle.
After that, who knows? She thinks she may retire in 10 years and says that, at the first sign of any artistic decline, she would certainly quit. “I could cold-bloodedly stop playing if I felt I wasn’t able to re-create what I could hear in my inner ear,” she says. “Of course, everyone before me has said that and they carry on. One really needs friends who can say bluntly, ‘Forget it, that was your last evening.’ “
The situation is awful to contemplate, yet she imagines these blunt friends, that last evening, with a smile, and jokes that we have covered her past, present and future. It shows a peculiar resilience and courage – in her life as in her music. Truly, Heifitz and Mother Teresa. And not forgetting, though Mutter modestly puts it down to clever camera work, Jerry Hall.
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