Let's Do the Time Warp Again

By Michael Walsh

If, like some musical Rip Van Winkle, a 19th century man awoke today in a concert hall or an opera house after decades of slumber, he would find that things had hardly changed. Stirring to life in his seat, he would pick up the comforting strains of a Beethoven symphony. Blinking his eyes in the theater's darkness, he would notice the familiar sets of a Verdi opera. Only after he stumbled to his feet at the end of the program and sought out his horse and carriage would he learn that, for the rest of the world, time had indeed gone by.

But not for classical music. A century after the great flowering of music in the U.S. that saw the establishment of many of the major orchestras and the opening of Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera, American orchestras and opera companies face an unprecedented challenge. Unsure of their role in modern society, the large institutions have embraced an aging, hidebound repertory. Too timid to seek out new directions, they have been seduced by a museum philosophy that has consigned them to the rear guard of contemporary musical life. Afflicted by systemic deficits, they coddle their subscribers but fear bold steps in programming that might win them a new audience.

As the curtain goes up on a new year of opera and symphonic performances across the U.S., is it really about to come down on a tradition that Americans have long considered the epitome of high culture? Ernest Fleischmann, the formidable executive director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, thinks so. "We must accept that the orchestra as we know it is dead," he declared last May. "It's dead because symphony concerts have become dull and predictable; musicians and audiences are suffering from repetitive routines and formula- type programming; there is an acute shortage of conductors who not only know their scores inside out but also are inspiring leaders; and there is just as great a shortage of administrators who possess artistic vision and imagination."

This may seem a severe indictment of a healthy "industry"; audiences for concert music and opera are probably larger than ever. The postwar cultural revolution spawned scores of new orchestras, opera companies and chamber-music groups; there are now 1,572 symphony orchestras in the country, almost as many as the number of daily newspapers. Visits of major domestic and international ensembles to Carnegie Hall still provoke feeding frenzies among ticket buyers. Everywhere, it seems, there are more performances, longer seasons, higher budgets, higher fees -- and higher costs.

Even in the numbers game, though, ominous signs point to a retrenchment. Within the past couple of seasons, the Oakland Symphony has folded, and the San Diego Symphony temporarily suspended operations. The Houston Symphony, once a glittering symbol of a booming community, now reflects its city's stagnant economy: its music director is leaving, and there has been an administrative shuffle as well. The San Francisco Opera, one of the nation's largest companies, canceled its summer season because of a $2 million deficit. Says Tully Friedman, president of the company's board: "We're going to have to retool the way we do business to survive in the '80s and beyond."

American arts organizations, lacking extensive government subsidies, have long been aristocratic beggars, dependent on private philanthropy. More crucial is the anomie now afflicting the art. "Classical music is now a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand," writes & Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind, a brisk indictment of the dumbing-down of America. Although Bloom blames the rise and triumph of rock music for the cultural sansculottism he decries, much of the onus must be shouldered by the major musical organizations, which have allowed the skein of creativity to slip through their grasp.

For roughly half a century, the musical repertory has been hardening into a core group of venerated masterpieces. No longer is the test of musical accomplishment to be found -- as it was in the days of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt and even Mahler -- in the creation and persuasive performance of new music. Now the art is basically re-creative, not creative; it is performers, not composers, whom audiences cherish. With few notable exceptions (Pianist Maurizio Pollini, Conductor Dennis Russell Davies, Violinist Gidon Kremer), performers today are largely content with a static repertory that recedes further into history with each passing year. They offer the big works that burnish their own reputations but do little to advance the cause of the art they profess to serve.

It is currently fashionable to bemoan the lack of individuality among instrumentalists and to wonder where all the great opera singers have gone, as if there were some mysterious force sapping the vitality of modern musicians. But there is plenty of spunk in popular music, which still prizes and rewards the composer-performer: garage bands from Hoboken to Hollywood are rehearsing right now, working in a natural, comfortable idiom. Far better to wonder whether classical music, as it is currently practiced, offers enough stimulation for prospective interpreters.

As an example, take the new production of Verdi's Il Trovatore at the Met last November. Offering a wobbly soprano, Joan Sutherland, now in distinct vocal decline; a slimmed-down tenor, Luciano Pavarotti, a shell, both physically and vocally, of his former robust self; and a conductor, Richard Bonynge, whose principal claim to fame is that he is Sutherland's husband, the performance was a logy run-through of a tired repertory staple, ineptly designed and clumsily directed. Even the housebroken Met audience was offended: the production was roundly booed at its opening-night conclusion. It was enough to turn almost any opera lover into a Bon Jovi fan.

The deepening economic crunch has made all performers hostages of the musical administrators, who exercise an invisible sway over programming. Few general managers have the courage -- and few companies, it must be admitted, the fiscal might -- to risk alienating subscribers and venture down new paths. Why take the box-office risk of commissioning a major new work or building a concert around an unfamiliar one, when you can pack the house with Beethoven? "Conductors, who should be cultural leaders, are not up to the responsibility of leadership," complains Pulitzer-prizewinni ng Composer Leon Kirchner. "When there is a vacuum in leadership, managerial people take over. They are not capable of making cultural judgments, but they are forced to because no one else is making them."

Thus music has become trapped in a time warp. At the New York Philharmonic's inaugural concert in 1842, the program was Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and an excerpt from his opera Fidelio, selections from Carl Maria von Weber's Oberon, a quintet by Johann Nepomuk Hummel, a duet from Rossini's opera Armida, an aria from Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio and a new overture by the Bohemian composer Johann Wenzel Kalliwoda. At the time, Mozart had been dead for 51 years, Beethoven for only 15, Weber for 16 and Hummel for five. Rossini was 50 years old, and Kalliwoda was 41.

If the same program were to be approximated today, by both age and style, it might consist of music by two living composers, Philip Glass, 50, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, 48, as well as the late Alban Berg, Luigi Dallapiccola and Howard Hanson. The chance of such a program occurring on a regular subscription concert today -- not just once but throughout the season -- is almost nil. (Poring over the Boston Symphony's archives in the early 1960s, Kirchner discovered that before World War II, roughly 35% of the repertoire was devoted to music composed within a decade, as opposed to about 7% at the time of his study.) "It's a terrible situation," says Composer Jacob Druckman, who organized the New York Philharmonic's now defunct series of enterprising Horizons concerts. "In the theater and painting there is tremendous interest in this century and not so much in the past. In music it is just the opposite."

Most prominent performers see nothing inherently wrong with the repertory system. "It is absolutely essential that every generation have a chance to hear the intellectual and aesthetic achievements worthy of outlasting its own days and years," says Conductor Robert Shaw of the Atlanta Symphony. Observes Leonard Slatkin, music director of the St. Louis Symphony: "Music, in ^ essence, preserves history in sound. As long as people are interested in the past, they will always be interested in symphony orchestras." And both Shaw and Slatkin are innovative programmers, Shaw a champion of American music and Slatkin a leading exponent of neglected British Composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, among others.

One of the hoariest cliches justifying timorous programming is that there is always someone in the audience who has never heard Beethoven's Fifth. "For the first-time viewer, you've got to have Bohemes and Toscas and Carmens," says Ardis Krainik, general manager of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, whose company this season had an unexpected hit with Glass's Satyagraha. "Those are the things they need to bring them back again." But is sheer repetition of a handful of staples the way to cultivate new audiences?

A familiar conceit is that each conductor interprets a masterpiece differently, continually freshening it. That may once have been true, when there were fewer concerts than today. But airplanes, records and the 52-week season have changed the rules of the game. Works are repeated incessantly in the concert hall by the same succession of globe-trotting conductors, and the same performance can be heard repeatedly at home. Not only have certain pieces become norms but their interpretations have as well.

What to do? No one supposes that the millennium has arrived and that mainstream audiences will happily sit still for an evening of contemporary music. But new music is not the only road to innovative programming. There are scores of neglected works by masters great and small that deserve dusting off. Instead of Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, for example, why not the equally seductive but infrequently heard tone poem, The Wood Dove? Instead of Beethoven's pawky Second Piano Concerto or the overplayed Violin Concerto of Mendelssohn, why not Rimsky-Korsakov's dashing Piano Concerto or Carl Nielsen's melancholic Violin Concerto? Instead of another Brahms' First Symphony, how about Joachim Raff's spooky "Lenore" Symphony, once greatly admired in the 19th century, or Austrian Composer Franz Schmidt's brooding Fourth Symphony, written in 1932-33?

Operatically, there are Mozart's youthful Il sogno di Scipione and Vaughan Williams' radiant vision of the celestial city, The Pilgrim's Progress. And some company could put itself on the map with a production of Soviet Composer Yuri Shaporin's spectacular Dekabristi (The Decembrists), a thrilling musical melange of Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Shostakovich that is also a vivid piece of theater.

Alas, few major institutions, the ones with the largest budgets and highest profiles, are willing to stray too far from their Top 40, oldies-only play lists. But American musicians are the most flexible in the world; none can read new scores more adeptly or are able to confront so many styles with such aplomb. Why not put this talent to use? As Atlanta's Shaw observes, "The American symphony orchestra is not only failing to serve its audience in the fullest measure, but to its own members it offers a life of such restricted fare and expression that the very best of its artists have to seek artistic fulfillment outside of its structure."

Some 2 1/2 centuries after Bach welded the twelve major and minor keys into a harmonious whole in The Well-Tempered Clavier, 185 years after Beethoven stretched the boundaries of the symphony with the "Eroica," and 65 years after Arnold Schoenberg exploded the tonal universe by unleashing the power of the twelve-tone system, classical music can still be a vital, potent art. But it needs a kind of panoramic energy, one that explores and prizes its past, frankly assesses its present and enthusiastically prepares for its future.

It needs, at last, to throw off the myths that enthrall it. Not all the music that is worth hearing is being heard. New music is not automatically fearsome nor unplayed works from the past intrinsically worthless. The media- fueled system that turns performers into celebrities needs serious re- examination; The Tonight Show and Madison Square Garden ought not to be venues that certify stars.

Artists and administrators need the courage to chart a more rewarding course, but audiences do too. Those who hailed the deaf Beethoven at the Ninth Symphony's unveiling, who lined the streets of Milan for Verdi's funeral, who wept as the dying Brahms took a final public bow at a performance of his Fourth Symphony, who rioted at the debut of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring were no more sophisticated than today's listeners. It is simply that no one told them they were listening to classical music. What they experienced was not the passive appreciation of a dead art but love and wonder at its terrible, living beauty.