PRIVATE PASSIONS OF BENJAMIN ZANDER
World Link
The magazine of the World Economic Forum
For the past 30 years, Ben Zander, Conductor, Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, has been waging a one man war against the Romantic treatment of Beethoven. Here he tells Charles Darwent what has driven his approach to the German maestro
The guests at the London Radisson have never seen anything like it. An elegant, bushy-haired man is dancing around the breakfast bar shouting, “This is what a marche funèbre is like! Half steps! Half steps! Like this! So the one in the Eroica should go da-da-DEE-da, da-da-DEE-da, not DEE-da-da-da, DEE-da-da-da.” Fellow diners avoid his eye and call pleadingly for their bills.
Actually, Benjamin Zander is perfectly harmless, unless, of course, you happen to like your Beethoven Romantic. For the past 30 years, Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic and guest conductor of London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, has waged a one-man war against the tradition of Beethoven playing that has prevailed since the mid-19th century. “In 1970, I took out the score of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to conduct it and what I saw was not what I had always heard,” says Zander, hands waving like windmills. “Frankly, I was shocked. I’d grown up with a specific image of how those first notes sound… you know, the wartime BBC da-da-da-DAAH business, but the metronome marking on the score is much, much faster, 108 clicks per minute. When I conducted the Fifth as Beethoven had written it, Boston was set on its ear. The critics couldn’t believe what they were hearing.”
They have spent three decades in the same state of disbelief. Listen to a Zander performance of Beethoven, his recent Eroica in London, for example, and you feel as though you’ve stumbled across a new and slightly frightening composer. The tunes are vaguely familiar, but the tempi… “My Eroica comes in at about 46 minutes, where other people’s are normally around 55-56,” beams Zander. “But then someone who heard Beethoven’s own performance of the Ninth said that he did it in 45 minutes: so what’s new?”
Add to this that Zander’s Seventh Symphony was so fast that it could be squeezed onto a single CD and you see how critics might approach his performances with licked lips. It doesn’t bother Zander in the slightest. “Beethoven lived in a world beyond the comfortable,” he says, eyes gleaming with Beethovian zeal. “A world of discord, where we are forced to confront our anxieties as he did his own deafness. His was a truly revolutionary spirit.”
“Beethoven was the greatest musician who has ever lived.
Who are we to say he didn’t mean his tempo markings?”
LIVING BEETHOVEN
Certainly, Zander’s Beethoven is not comfortable to listen to; nor, as it happens, to play. “During rehearsals for the Eroica , the concert mistress came to me and said, ‘Ben, that’s unplayable’,” gesticulates Zander, impatiently. “I was tempted to say, as Beethoven did, ‘What do I care for your lousy fiddle?’ But,” a saintly smile, “what I actually said was ‘I may have been a little over-tempo.’ The next time we played it, she said it was playable, just. The difference was 116 on the metronome instead of 118; a knife-edge variation”.
So why is Zander so insistent that Beethoven be played according to his tempo markings? He cites the case of the largo in Shostakovich’s Fifth . Being a march, this has always been conducted triumphantly, listeners (including one Joseph Stalin) assuming that the composer meant it as a celebration of Soviet Socialism. In fact, Shostakovich’s tempo markings turn it to a cry of despair. Tempi are not to be taken lightly. “Here was Beethoven, a deaf man who could hear entire symphonic orchestrations in his head,” yelps an exasperated Zander. “He was the greatest musician who ever lived. Who are we to say he didn’t mean his tempo markings? We know that the first question he used to ask people who’d heard his concerts was always ‘How were the tempi?’ The whole point of his music is that it’s difficult, rebellious, counter-intuitive.”
Which is why, Zander suggests, the Romantics toned him down. “Karajan was the worst offender,” he snorts. “He turned Beethoven into a smooth operator. People just couldn’t cope with his vision of heroism as something that involves facing up to torment. Beethoven tells us how to see the world; he tells us how to live.”
It is a lesson Ben Zander is particularly keen to impress on the players in another of his bands, the Boston-based Youth Philharmonic Orchestra. Composed of talented 12-16 year-olds, the YPO is more than a good work for the conductor. (He is flying straight back from conducting the Eroica to a regular weekly rehearsal) “Working with those kids reminds me who I am,” says Zander. “When I make a speech at Davos, that’s not me. Me is with the kids on Saturday afternoons. We have such fun they’ll stop at nothing, those children. They’re revolutionaries.” Good at Beethoven? “They are very good at Beethoven,” laughs Zander. “No: they are wonderful at Beethoven.” And he half-steps back to the breakfast bar, humming at 108 beats to the minute.
Zander is a charlatan. He who has ears let him hear. Much ado about nothing always facilitates the most spontaneous and gleaming response from the blinkered Jo public. It only requires a single musician, from the many, to see that the Emperor is naked.
Interesting indeed. Mr George Warrington must clearly be an authority on Mr Zander. And, even more interesting is that even after 30 years as the Director of one of world’s most famous orchestra’s, so few people seem to share Mr Warrington’s acute visionary abilities – of seeing in a highly talented and no doubt very complex man, a naked Emperor. But then, beauty is, as they say, in the eye of the beholder!