Харуки Мураками - Absolutely on Music

OZAWA: No, I don’t think so.

MURAKAMI: Schoenberg and Alban Berg were certainly very conscious of being avant-garde, though.

OZAWA: Oh, very much so. They had their “method.” Mahler had no such thing.

MURAKAMI: So he flirted with chaos, not as a methodology, but very naturally and instinctively. Is that what you’re saying?

OZAWA: Yes. Isn’t that exactly where his genius lies?

MURAKAMI: There was a development like that in jazz, too. In the 1960s, John Coltrane kept edging closer and closer to “free jazz,” but basically he stayed within the bounds of a loose tonality called “mode.” People still listen to his music today—but “free jazz” is little more than a historical footnote. What we’re talking about may be kind of like that.

OZAWA: Wow, so there was something like that in jazz?

MURAKAMI: Come to think of it, though, Mahler had no clear successors. The main symphonic composers who came after him were not Germans but Soviet Russians, like Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Shostakovich’s symphonies are vaguely reminiscent of Mahler.

OZAWA: Yes, very much so. I agree. But Shostakovich’s music is very coherent. You don’t feel the same kind of craziness you do in Mahler.

MURAKAMI: Maybe for political reasons it wasn’t easy for him to let anything like craziness come out. There’s also something deeply abnormal about Mahler’s music. If I had to put a label on it, I’d call it schizophrenic.

OZAWA: Yes, it’s true. The art of Egon Schiele is like that, too. When I saw his pictures, I could really see how he and Mahler were living in the same place at the same time. Living in Vienna for a while, I got a strong sense of that atmosphere. It was a tremendously interesting experience for me.

MURAKAMI: Reading a Mahler biography I see he noted that being director of the Vienna Court Opera was the top position in the musical world. In order to obtain that position, he went so far as to abandon his Jewish faith and convert to Christianity. He felt the position was worth making such a sacrifice. It occurs to me that you were in that very position until quite recently.

OZAWA: He really said that, did he? Do you know how many years he was director of the Court Opera?

MURAKAMI: Nearly eleven years, I think.

OZAWA: For somebody who spent such a long time conducting opera, it’s amazing that he never wrote one of his own. I wonder why not. He wrote all those Lieder, and he was very conscious of the combination of words and music.

MURAKAMI: That’s true, now that you mention it. It’s too bad. But given the kind of person he was, it might have been hard for him to choose a libretto.

The Boston Symphony continues playing.

MURAKAMI: Hmm, listening to them playing like this, the sheer quality of the Boston Symphony Orchestra is almost overwhelming.

OZAWA: Well, I did spend all those years polishing it to make it a world-class orchestra, so the quality ought to be high! The Boston, the Cleveland … the technical accomplishment of orchestras of that caliber is fantastic.

The string section gives elegant voice to the beautiful “pastoral” passage.

MURAKAMI: You can’t get a sound like that out of the Saito Kinen?

OZAWA: Well, after all …

MURAKAMI: It’s just a different sound.

OZAWA: It depends on what the listener is looking for—a harmonious, thoroughly beautiful, finished performance; or one that is not so perfect but has a touch of danger. Such differences can easily arise in Mahler’s case—and especially in this movement, which is so full of such passages.

Ozawa studies the score intently.

OZAWA: Oh, I see, this piece was first performed in Budapest.

MURAKAMI: And was very poorly received, I gather.

OZAWA: I would imagine that the performance was not very good.

MURAKAMI: Maybe the orchestra couldn’t really understand how it ought to be played.

OZAWA: The first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was a fiasco, too, you know. Of course the work itself was partly to blame, but it could well be that the orchestra wasn’t fully prepared to perform it. The piece is full of musical acrobatics. I wish I had asked Pierre Monteux about it directly. We were fairly close for a while.

MURAKAMI: Now that you mention it, Monteux conducted that first performance, didn’t he?

The music comes to the section where the strings and the wind instruments clash head-on and become entangled, like the tails of several complicated dreams (8:43– 9:01).

OZAWA: This part is a little crazy, isn’t it?

MURAKAMI: It does contain a kind of madness, doesn’t it?

OZAWA: But in the Boston Symphony’s performance, it all comes together smoothly like this.

MURAKAMI: That’s part of the orchestra’s DNA, isn’t it, to calm down the chaos and fill in the gaps?

OZAWA: The members listen to each other and adjust quite naturally. This is, of course, one of the Boston’s outstanding features.

MURAKAMI: I think it’s very difficult for performers to grasp the similarities between the dissociation in Mahler’s music and the general dissociation experienced by those of us living in the present day. But if you were to perform this same piece with the Boston Symphony right now, don’t you think it would sound very different?

OZAWA: It certainly would. I myself have changed, and …

The Boston Symphony’s performance of the third movement ends.

MURAKAMI: I don’t know, this performance was kind of like making a leisurely tour in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz.

Ozawa laughs.

MURAKAMI: By contrast, the Saito Kinen was like zipping around in a sports car with a nice stick shift.

OZAWA: Listening to it like this, the performance has that steadiness you’d expect from the Boston Symphony, doesn’t it?

Ozawa Continues to Change

OZAWA: These conversations with you have made me realize how much I’ve changed over the years. Just recently, as you know, I went to Carnegie Hall with the Saito Kinen to perform the Brahms First, the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique, and Britten’s War Requiem, and that experience changed me quite a bit.

MURAKAMI: I’m sure you’re changing even now.

OZAWA: Even at my age, you change. And practical experience keeps you changing. This may be one of the distinguishing features of the conductor’s profession. The work itself changes you. Of course the one thing that any conductor has to do is to get sounds out of the orchestra. I read the score and create a piece of music in my mind, after which I work with the orchestra members to turn that into actual sound, and that process gives rise to all kinds of things. There are the interpersonal relationships, of course, and also the musical judgments you make when you decide which particular points of the work you want to emphasize. There are times when you look at the music and really focus on the long phrases, and, conversely, times when you split hairs over the tiny phrases. You also have to decide which of these various tasks you are going to favor. Each of these experiences will change a conductor. I got sick, went into the hospital, and stayed away from conducting for a long time. But then recently I went to New York and had a burst of conducting. Then I came back to Japan, and because I had nothing else to do at New Year’s, I listened to recordings of those Saito Kinen performances over and over again. I learned a lot from them.

MURAKAMI: You learned a lot …?

OZAWA: It was the first time in my life that I had ever listened to recordings of my own performances with such intense concentration.

MURAKAMI: The first time in your life? Don’t you always listen closely to recordings of your performances?