ANDREAS LÁNG & OLIVER LÁNG IN AN INTERVIEW WITH CONDUCTOR CHRISTIAN THIELEMANN
BUBBLE BATH IN A MINOR KEY ll
Initially, people criticised the composer Hans Pfitzner for being “modernist”, later he was frequently labelled conservative. What was he in fact? How would you describe Pfitzner in a few sentences for an opera newbie? ct I find him harmonically far superior to Richard Strauss – with the exception of works such as Elektra or some passages in Die Frau ohne Schatten. In general, Pfitzner’s entire musical language is much more austere, less facile. This is also due to his choice of subjects: he never set a Rosenkavalier to music; he never went in that direction. What both Pfitzner and Strauss have in common is an incredible feeling for the theatre. ll And how would you summarise Palestrina? The work has many facets, from an artist’s struggle all the way to comedy, as seen in some passages in act 2. ct Palestrina is a drama about an artist. And it is a piece brimming with CHRISTIAN THIELEMANN
contrasts. In act 1 we experience Palestrina’s self-doubt, the apparitions of the old music masters, this tremendous scene where Mass is sung – almost Wagnerian in proportions! In act 2 there is also, as you say, caricature; it is at times almost preposterous, slapstick! Then it becomes violent, there is shooting, there is torture... welcome to real life! Act 3 tries to create a synthesis from all this, the mood is again closer to act 1, and the opera ends on a very melan choly note. Palestrina was ultimately forced to find inspiration – and here I see something timeless and relevant. After all, how often do politicians try to co-opt artists! Palestrina is always a warning to me: do not do that, stay independent! ll The caricature nature of act 2 also gives us precise portraits of the characters... ct Li ke Wag ner a nd R icha rd Strauss, Pfitzner also had an incredible gift for characterising people –
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SABINE BUSCH
PFITZNER ALL’ ITALIANA THE FUTILE PURSUIT OF INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION Pfitzner the German, if not the “most German of living composers”, was how the composer of Palestrina liked to see himself, and this is how he described his self-image in all seriousness and without the slightest idea that this might be challenged. He could justifiably have possessed many of the qualifications for seeing himself as a cosmopolitan, as he was born to German parents in Moscow and had spent many years in Strasbourg, Alsace, where French and German influence abounded in equal measure. But to a greater degree even than Richard Wagner, his creative father figure, who over the years became less and less willing to tolerate “foreign airs and foreign glitter”, Pfitzner also lacked the attributes of a man of the world; his language skills were limited, his trips abroad were primarily for guest performances or concerts and scarcely seem to have kindled any deeper interest in other lifestyles in him. His taste in literature and music was also almost exclusively restricted to his native fare, to
German intellectual culture and “German characteristics.” It was therefore only natural that in the 1930s some National Socialist groups tried to portray Pfitzner as a pioneer and mastermind of their movement – the conservative, even almost regressive artist had already laid solid foundations for this in his writings in the 1920s. Influenced by the experience of losing the First World War, which he personally felt to be devastating, in papers critical of the German-Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni and the music writer Paul Bekker Pfitzner had abandoned discussion and launched a wild, injurious, chauvinistic and antisemitic polemic against all those who “defiled” tradition and Germanness. “I want to see German culture treated positively, loved and preferred in Germany,” the composer had demanded – certainly without suspecting that, for similar reasons, after 1933 Adolf Hitler would launch a brutal and inhumane fight to eradicate everything “un-German.” Pfitzner’s self-definition
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PF I T ZN ER A L L’I TA L I A NA
as “most German” and his nationalism naturally went hand in hand; when it came to protecting the German intellectual world, he was primarily thinking of his own imaginary home altar (where Schumann, Weber, Eichendorff and G. A. Bürger had their devotional prayer corner) and of the cultivation and appreciation of his own musical work. Ultimately, on the one hand he lacked the political foresight and historical overview to be able to give more than just his personal conviction to the principles he so zealously advocated, and on the other hand he simply lacked the interest and enthusiasm for such an activity – he was after all primarily a composer, conductor and artist. He was happy to leave to those more qualified the establishment of an ideology or even the pseudo-scientific justification of the theory that it was precisely “German nature that the world needed to heal from”, just like the political realisation of a new, “third German Reich”. But when this became reality after Hitler came to power, Pfitzner was disappointed to find that the new government did not place any greater value on guiding its cultural policy based on his ideas. He continued to lag behind his colleague Richard Strauss, who was as pampered as ever by the powerful; his interventions against the exclusion of Jewish friends and performers were unsuccessful; the rebellious little Don Quixote of the opera world was treated outwardly with respect in the Nazi dictatorship, but he remained without any influence, and the number of performances of his works even decreased. The offended maestro, blessed with healthy self-confidence, took up the fight against the windmills, intervened indiscriminately with the
various powerful people of the Nazi dictatorship, complained to the press and friends, and set his lobby of loyal Pfitznerians in motion – but the success of his efforts fell far short of his expectations. He remained recognised and valued as the master of Palestrina, as a singer of the “German soul,” but the fact that he was still very much alive and ready for greater tasks despite his advanced age went largely unnoticed. It was probably simply too difficult for the leading brown-shirts to exploit the composer for their politics, given his unpredictable grumpiness and lack of loyalty to the party line, in which he kept in constant contact with Jewish émigrés or told jokes about Hitler and Eva Braun at large parties. Pfitzner was certainly a kind of living “national cultural shrine” in the Nazi dictatorship and would probably have had a good chance of a state funeral – but no one knew what to do with the very much alive artist who felt called to higher honours. Pfitzner was the very building block of his self-created monument, “Germanness”. Hitler could not do without Richard Strauss, who was also not exactly streamlined, as a cultural ambassador because, for example, Der Rosenkavalier had now found an audience far beyond German-speaking lands, while Pfitzner, who was accused of dark-grey late romanticism, remained an unchallenged matter for the German-speaking world; the geographic triangle of Vienna, Munich and Berlin was also an approximate boundary for the reception of his works. The foreign policy of the Hitler empire was so complicated, the definition of the terms allied and enemy nation were subject to such rapid fluctuation that the musical
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