Tag Archives: john eliot gardiner

It has been now perhaps 30 years since what was once called the “original instrument” movement in classical music took solid hold. Now usually referred to as the “historically-informed performance practice” movement (what a bureaucratic sounding phrase; I loathe it; there must be something better to call it), it has permeated not only the small bands of re-enactors (like Civil War re-enactors, really), but the mainstream classical music culture as a whole. Even when playing on modern instruments, performances are likely to be inflected by the historical re-enactor crowd.

And so, you get bouncy Beethoven and manic Mozart, often played with two or three fiddles to a part. It all sound anemic to me.

But I’ve been listening to the perfect antidote. I recommend you listen to the 1968 recording of The Antiphonal Music of Gabrieli, played by the combined brass sections of the Philadelphia, Cleveland and Chicago orchestras. It is absolutely glorious and I cannot imagine anyone coming away from listening to these choirs and not thinking “Wow!” and wishing they instead had heard the music on wheezing sackbutts and cornetts. (Sample here).

Or Glenn Gould in his 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a disc that can still shock a listener with its energy and life. The re-enactors insist Johann Sebastian should only be played on a harpsichord, but there is no keyboard more prone to monotony of tone and expression than the clangy jangly ear-assault of a harpsichord. Give me Bach on a piano any day, whether Gould or Rosalyn Tureck or Daniel Barenboim or Jeremy Denk. (Sample Gould here).

Just listen to Hélène Grimaud play the Busoni transcription of the chaconne from the Bach second violin partita, listen to it build to a glorious climax, with such brilliant pianism. This is music. (Link here).

Now, before you go away thinking I am a cranky old codger refusing to move with the times, I assure you I recognize the benefit to humankind wrought by the young whippersnappers. As far back as 1978, I got on board when I purchased an LP set of Handel’s Op. 6 concerti grossi led by Franzjosef Maier with the Collegium Aureum. It was bright, energetic, forceful and clean. For me, it was a revelation, compared with those soggy older recordings I had on Nonesuch or Turnabout. Handel was freed from the concrete shoes he had been wearing since the 19th century. It was liberation.

Many a composer has benefited from the historically-informed performance practice and many of the old works have been rediscovered. Vivaldi, Telemann, Geminiani and others have been reborn with new interest in their works. Beyond the Four Seasons, we now have scores of recordings of Vivaldi’s operas and vocal works. And a host of French work by Lully, Couperin, Rameau.

It wasn’t all peaches and roses, however. Under the mistaken idea that “original instruments” would refresh just about anything, I bought another LP, this time of Handel’s Water Music played by La Grande Ecurie and La Chambre du Roy under Jean-Claude Malgoire. What a horrible sound they made, scratchy, whiny, out of tune and struggling with the notes. The horns in the minuet, about 20 minutes in, is enough to make your eyes water. It didn’t just put me off original instruments, it put me off my soup. (Sample the opening of the Royal Fireworks Music here).

Of course, in those prehistoric-instrument days, string players were way ahead of wind players, who had not yet quite figured out how to play the old hautbois and chalumeaux. Things have improved greatly since then and many old-music specialists have become quite virtuosic. Nowadays, you can buy a CD of some obscure Baroque composer and feel sure you’re getting the real goods.

But, of course, while the re-enactors have gotten better, there has been a down side, also. When you find a new plaything, you want to daub it everywhere, and so, we even now have “historically informed” Berlioz, Wagner, even Bruckner. Like mustard on watermelon.

The tenets of the historically informed have become a kind of dogma and doctrine, and it gets applied to everything. A recent recording of a Beethoven symphony had four first and second violins, two violas, two cellos and a single bass. That might work well for Vivaldi, but for Beethoven it is a travesty. When he had the opportunity, Beethoven himself preferred 20 first and second violins. Brahms, who is now offered with chamber orchestras (because he once did that at Meiningen), actually much preferred the Vienna orchestra with 68 string players.

A recent recording of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony was released, conducted by François-Xavier Roth, according to “historical” practice. All the rules were followed. A reviewer lauded the performance, writing, “Thanks to Roth’s fleet interpretation — he seems intent on freeing Mahler from excess romantic baggage — we hear details usually buried under bulbous bellows and portamento-laden strings.” I had a good laugh: Mahler went to great lengths to put that romantic baggage into the work.

I wonder if next we can expect an edition of Mark Twain with all the excess humor taken out, or perhaps a Picasso run through a computer program to rearrange those Cubist faces back into something more like a passport photo. The portamentos are written into the score, after all.

As far as it being performed according to historical principles, well, one has to wonder what principles these might be. Roth could, for instance, have checked with the recordings of at least three conductors who actually knew Mahler, and two who actually conducted with him. Perhaps they might have some insight in the way the Fourth Symphony is supposed to sound and what true historical performance practice was. Check with Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, or Willem Mengelberg (who performed the Fourth for Mahler and got his direct approval and appreciation — and there is a recording to check.) Note: They all play with vibrato. Roth’s twin vices of arrogance and ignorance are astonishing.

But, of course, Roth isn’t really interested in the composer’s intent. The movement has given up all pretense that they are recreating the music the way it was first heard. (“We’re trying to show what the symphony would have sounded like when Beethoven first heard it.” “But Beethoven was deaf.”) Because the actual driving force behind the movement isn’t historical accuracy, but rock and roll, popular music, which privileges — as do the HIPP performers — rhythm, beat, and energy over harmony and melody. “Beat me, daddy, eight to the bar.”

Younger musicians have grown up with rock music, with heavy metal, with the drive of rhythm guitars (i.e., the continuo), and the pounding beat of drums. And as with rock music, there creeps into HIPP performances a kind of sameness — the mustard on the melon.

And so, Roth, like the other re-enactors, is interested in making the music sound like all the other HIPP performances — whether Handel, Berlioz or Bruckner. Thin strings, clipped rhythms, rushed tempi.

Modern conductors now too often have ideas where their ears are supposed to be. And so, instead of a performance of music, you get a lecture on how the music is “supposed” to be played.

It reminds me of film director Lars von Trier and his Dogme 95 film movement and its “vow of cinematic chastity,” where a filmmaker was required to adhere to a series of “dogmas:” required to shoot on location, not on a constructed set; to avoid using music unless it was being played onscreen as part of the story; to use no artificial lighting; to make no film not set in the present time, no costumes but what the actors bring with them … and a host of other rules restricting the “artifice” of moviemaking. It was a set of rules so puritanical that even von Trier had to give them up eventually.

The period re-enactors of classical music have their own manifesto: To avoid vibrato; to observe strictly the composers’ metronome markings (even when Beethoven specifically tells them not do to so); to phrase in short, often two- and three-note groups; to hit the rhythms by barline with a sledgehammer; to use small instrumental groups; to employ countertenors when possible (given castrati are no longer available); to employ valveless trumpets and horns; to use old instruments or recreations of old instruments, with fewer keys, and wooden flutes, or recorders. And please, no pianos allowed; harpsichords or vintage fortepianos only.

The result, too often, is music in a strait-jacket. We know that Beethoven complained harshly about the restrictions of instruments available in his day, and that future instruments would be better able to express his intentions. In essence, some of the peculiarities of Beethoven’s orchestration are because of the limitations of instruments in his time.

As Donald Francis Tovey once observed, “Scholarship itself is not obliged to insist on the restoration of conditions that ought never to have existed.”

Which brings me back to Gabrieli and the great brass players of the big American orchestras. This is music as a glory, as joyous, as sheer pleasure. Is it what Gabrieli would have heard in Venice in 1597? No, but I’m sure he would have loved it. It was meant to be music, not a treatise.

The current dogma forgets one important fact: The music doesn’t belong to Gabrieli; it belongs to us. The same with Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, or Mozart. They are dead and the music survives. And it is we who now own it. The sheet music is an artifact that needs musicianship to bring it to the ear and musicianship is now and always has been more important than scholarship.

Imagine if we insisted that Shakespeare be performed only outdoors, with boys dressed up in the women’s parts, and all declaiming their lines loudly enough to be heard in the back rows, and no breaks into acts and scenes. Interesting as an experiment, to understand the theater of Shakespeare’s day, but hardly an ideal way to do Hamlet. Could we now take seriously Romeo making love to a Juliet in drag?

You can now find Mozart, for instance, played by John Eliot Gardiner or Roy Goodman or Frans Brüggen and it zips along almost like a mechanical clock, fleet, crisp and rhythmic. All the notes are there, and the instructions in the score are obeyed. But something vital is missing. Something human.

And so, I turn to hear Mozart played with humanity and and emphasis on songfulness, not metronome markings and I hear Bruno Walter’s Mozart, or Pablo Casals’.

I used to have the complete Mozart symphonies played by Charles Mackerras, in period style, but I gave them away and got Karl Böhm and the Berlin Philharmonic. Böhm understood the style, the music, and what the music meant. There is nothing really wrong with Mackerras — he was a wonderful conductor — but his Mozart imitates the period-re-enactor esthetic and turns what should be warm melody into a patter-song. I have given up on historically-informed Mozart.

(I make a slight exception for the early symphonies performed by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, but then Harnoncourt, aka “the Wild Man of Borneo” was sui generis — not really original instruments as much as the original Harnon-world. He was never afraid of bringing his Harnon-personality to the performance. Harnoncourt is always full of personality, albeit, sometimes you scratch your head.)

One of the seeming goals of period-re-enactors is to erase the musician from the music. They complain, for instance, that Leonard Bernstein’s Mozart is more Bernstein than Mozart. Well, of course — it is meant to be Mozart filtered through the sensibility of a performer. The notes on the page are neutral. The performance should not be. The musician puts the blood back into the notes. The score is only a skeleton.

I’m not making a case here particularly for Bernstein’s Mozart; he was never as trenchant in Mozart as he was, say in Haydn, where he was magnificent. But rather making a case for interpretation. The re-enactors say they don’t want their music “interpreted,” but merely played.

Someone once said that reading a cookbook doesn’t make you a good cook. Period-re-enactors want us to enjoy the raw ingredients — the mise en place — without the actual cooking. Really, more like eating a cookbook.

I don’t wish to proscribe historically-informed performance practice. After all, it revitalized Baroque and earlier music. But I should point out that we can’t actually know what the music sounded like back then. It is guesswork. The sources for period performance practice are not in agreement. Some 18th century writers tell string players not to use vibrato; others instruct the opposite. Which pedagogue do you believe (obviously, the one that makes your music sound more like rock and roll).

Further, the fact that some of the old teachers instruct their students not to use vibrato is actually evidence that they were bucking the system, that, in fact, most fiddlers back then really were using it and needed to be told to give it up.

Even if re-enactors can re-animate the forgotten Baroque composers, and make us understand Handel and Vivaldi in a newer, brighter way, musicianship is still more important than scholarship. I cannot stand the revisionism applied to Bach. The two- and three-note phrasing makes hash of Bach’s long line, and ignores the intricate play of harmonies in order to emphasize the forward drive — the relentless bang-bang-bang.

But most of all, I miss the personality of the performer in the re-enactors. When I listen to Bach by Gould or Tureck or Martha Argerich, I hear the music as the melded expression of both composer and performer — someone making sense of the notes. And that sense changes over time and place. It cannot be fixed in an imaginary historical moment. It is ours to parse out. Mozart has no say in it, and obviously, cannot.

And so, if we get Walter’s Mozart on one night, we get Harnoncourt’s on another. Or the warmth and humanity of Pablo Casals. (Bruno Walter’s Mozart Symphony No. 39 here). Each version is valid, but the music is waiting there for yet another. Of course, HIPP is an interpretation, too. John Eliot Gardiner brings his personality to the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. Unfortunately, it is the personality of an accountant.

HIPP-hop music

July 5, 2013

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In the 1970s, a few crackpot music directors attempted to play early classical music — primarily Baroque music — on the instruments that were available 250 years ago: valveless trumpets and horns, keyless oboes and violins with gut strings. Those early attempts today are hard to listen to, with scratchy fiddles and sour brass, all terribly out of tune.

Things have gotten a lot better since then.

But those pioneers were the vanguard of a burgeoning movement in the classical music world, and in the intervening years have wielded such power, they are now the mainstream of the art, even when they aren’t there.

That is, even standard symphony orchestras now attempt to play what they call “historically informed performance practice,” or HIPP. Even if they use modern instruments, they have been infected with the dogma of the original instrument cadre. It has not been to the advantage of Bach, Mozart or Beethoven.

As the HIPP movement extends its tentacles into the 19th century repertoire, it has been more than unkind to that century’s composers, it has mangled and misrepresented them.

Because, in fact, the historical performance movement is less about historical accuracy in performance technique, and more about making classical music become like the popular music of our own time: There is a decided de-emphasis on harmonic movement and structure, and a peculiar emphasis on forward movement and the beat. Always the inflexible beat. It is so relentlessly percussive, might as well be rock and roll.

I don’t know how its proponents can be so blind to their own propaganda. If you want to know what’s going on in Bach’s music, look at it. Don’t worry about a lot of dogma. How can Baroque specialists so completely misread Bach’s music? How can they break up those long, flowing lines into short choppy phrases and not understand they are butchering the score.

“Baroque music is all based on the dance,” they say. It is dance music. So, they say, it should be bouncy and rhythmic. Well, maybe. But the allemandes and courantes of Bach are only as close to their original dances as Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantasie is to the original Polish court dance, which is to say, very distantly. They are no longer dance music, they are musical essays on the dance. To turn them into jiggy-boom-boom is to do violence to the profound thought and imagination that have transformed them.

It’s like the way an undergrad grabs onto some small and obvious insight and thinks he has found the key to unlock the universe.

This isn’t to say that the HIPP movement hasn’t helped us hear once more a good deal of pre-Bach music that had been previously ignored or misunderstood. Certainly Handel has benefited from the rethinking of his music. We cannot now hear a Furtwangler performance of a Handel concerto grosso without feeling it is soggy and underwater. The new brightness and fleetness helps.

But that doesn’t make HIPP a kind of syrup we pour over the entire history of music.

My biggest gripe, after the loss of the Bach long line, is the enfeeblement of Beethoven.

One can see how the century has moved in this direction. An ironic 20th century didn’t know quite what to do with a 19th century that believed in such things as nobility, heroism, providence, fate and triumph. After even the First World War, these concepts seemed iffy at best. After the Second World War, they seemed downright dangerous.

So, nobility and heroism are out the window. One can understand why, but without them, Beethoven no longer seems important. He might as well be dinner music.

This ties in with Modernism’s faith in the abstract form, and so, music lost its belief in narrative, in the possibility of carrying philosophical thought.

“To some, the Eroica is about heroism,” said conductor Arturo Toscanini. “To me it is just allegro con brio.”

Arturo Toscanini

Or, as Igor Stravinsky put it, “Music can express nothing.”

It was a provincialism of the 20th century. It could not possibly understand what was going on in Beethoven’s most difficult music.

(I understand that the 19th century didn’t make things easy for us, by going overboard on “programs” for symphonies, and tying specific narratives to otherwise abstract music. Perhaps if those programs hadn’t been so universally mawkish and sentimental, they wouldn’t have caused such a backlash in the century that followed).

But Beethoven himself said as clearly as could be, that he put those extra-musical ideas into his music. They are meant to be there. Excising them in a kind of battlefield surgery: an amputation that only leaves the music disfigured or dead.

If you want to hear the difference, you should listen first to a modern recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. One could stack the deck and try the recording by Gunther Schuller and a studio orchestra, made in 1995 as a companion to his book, The Compleat Conductor. His argument: That a conductor should not “interpret” the music, but just present what there in the score.

Gunther Schuller

That means, an inflexible beat, a speed based on questionable metronome markings left by the composer years after having written the music, and a complete lack of expressivity.

Or, try recordings by David Zinmann or John Eliot Gardiner, both fine conductors as far as it goes. But they both have been influenced by HIPP, and therefore play the music too fast, too metronomically and purposely suck the philosophical subtext out of the music. They simply don’t believe in it.

Compare any of those with the wartime recording by Wilhelm Furtwangler, in which the weight of the world is felt in the music, and the hope of transcendence burns brightly in the finale. It is an emotional experience that will leave you breathless and sweaty. Beethoven’s struggle is your own struggle.

Wilhelm Furtwangler

Many listeners today prefer the modern performances, and find the Furtwangler version overwrought. I can do nothing for them; they should listen to pop music outright and not look for a “classier” simulacrum. But they are missing the overwhelming experience classical music can give them. What they get instead is background music.

The musicians are not robots, reproducing some Platonic ideal; they are rather deeply feeling artists who use the score to express their own inner selves. To complain that Bernstein’s Beethoven is more Lenny than Ludwig is to miss the point entirely. He was doing his job, bringing the music alive from the cage of the music staff, freeing it into life. Gardiner’s Beethoven is likewise more John Eliot than Ludwig, too, but no one seems to notice.

This isn’t just a question of rubato. It is a question of how the rhetoric of performance can communicate the essence of the music. There are some conductors who speed up and slow down irrationally; that doesn’t help the music. But a great conductor will change speeds when it makes his point.

Heck, even Toscanini changes tempo constantly, although by such a small amount, some people don’t even notice it.

One problem is that the tradition has been broken.

Toscanini famously said, “Tradition is nothing but the last bad performance,” but he was wrong. Nowadays, we could turn that on its head: “HIPP is nothing but the last bad performance.”

Tradition is essential. It is the way all classical art forms, whether Indian classical music, Japanese Noh theater or Russian ballet. They are handed down elder to student over generations. Classical music is no different, except that there is a notation to help guide us. We are fooled if we think the one is a substitute for the other.

The 20th century piety is that the score is everything and faithfulness to the score is somehow a measure of the success of a performance. On the contrary, the score is only a guide. It has some information; it is a blueprint, not an edifice. But much is also missing; that missing part comes from a teacher handing down a tradition to the student. Without that tradition learned in the bone from an early age, there can be no early second beat in a Viennese waltz, no paring of dotted notes from fourths to thirds in jazz. Learning the tradition, getting it in your blood, is why American orchestras do Copland and Ives better than a German orchestra, and why, if you want to hear the Blue Danube played right, you have to go to Vienna, or hear musicians trained in the Viennese tradition.

HIPP is instant tradition, like instant tea. It is tradition not learned from elders but picked up from books and research. Book learning ain’t music.

I’ve sat in a number of master classes, taught by some of the greatest musicians of the first half, and middle of the 20th century. They learned from the old masters, and they handed over the wisdom they had learned — the musicianship — from their elders. It is a glorious thing to see: the lumpen student plays the notes, and then the teacher plays the music.

Faithfulness to the score is such a canard. Completely beside the point. All the great conductors of the past jimmied the orchestrations around when they felt it necessary to make the music communicate more directly. Even Toscanini, the poster child for the “objective” conductor, altered the scores, adding brass to the coda of the Eroica where they knew Beethoven’s valveless instrument couldn’t play the notes it was clear he would have had them play if they could.

Mahler re-orchestrated Schumann. Even Mozart re-wrote Handel’s Messiah. There is plenty of precedent for using the score as a starting point, not a prison. What you’re looking for is music, not a museum exhibit.

All of the arguments I have heard in favor of HIPP fail to persuade me. We cannot listen to 18th century music with 18th century ears. It’s an impossibility. To pretend that if we play Bach on recorders and harpsichords, with short-neck gut-string violins, we are somehow more “faithful” to the composer’s intentions is simple-minded. As someone once said, “The loudest sound Bach heard was a door slamming. If you wanted to give our listeners the experience that Bach had, you’d have to create a world without the last two centuries of history.”

Our ears are more assaulted every day. The context for an “authentic” performance cannot be had, making the performance inauthentic.

I admit to enjoying a performance or two of Mozart or Bach played on the original instruments, but it is only as an experiment, or as an approximation, for historical understanding. I no more want to hear only HIPP any more than I want to read text printed with the long “S” and ligatures. They look quaint, but they get in the way of reading.

Unexamined through all this is the basic premise that music should reflect the composer’s intent. It’s taken as an axiom. But few people are asking why.

We don’t insist that Shakespeare be performed outdoors, with boys playing the women’s parts and with the rhetorical delivery of Elizabethan actors. We don’t blanch at Richard Burton playing Hamlet in suit and tie. So why do we argue over whether Bach’s musicians played with a vibrato or not?

The music, after all, no longer belongs to Bach. It belongs to us.

The eternal recurrence

March 20, 2013

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In Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Mary (Diane Keaton) and Yale (Michael Murphy) devise what they call the “Academy of the Overrated” for such notables as Gustav Mahler, Scott Fitzgerald, Isak Dinesen and Carl Jung.

“Lenny Bruce, Can’t forget him, can we?”

“How about Norman Mailer?”

“I think those people are all terrific,” Woody argues back.

They go on to name Heinrich Boll, Vincent Van Gogh and Ingmar Bergman.

“Gee, what about Mozart?” says Woody. “You guys don’t wanna leave out Mozart.”

Suffice it to say, none of these artists is overrated. Reputations come and go, and sometimes an artist lauded in one generation is ignored in the next. But real work by real artists, sweating blood, can never be simply “overrated.”

Some may be overexposed, however. There is a problem in hearing a piece of music too often, or seeing a painting or a play too many times, so that familiarity breeds contempt.

Take Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Can anyone actually hear it anymore? It has been so overplayed for the past 200 years, that it no longer astonishes us, but rather fits into the comfortable, velvet-lined depression we have made for it in the jewel case of classical music. It is too well known to be heard.

Or Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel ceiling. How many angels support the Creator in his cloud of flowing robes? Without checking, you don’t know, because the picture has been largely reduced to our recognition of the electric spark that invisibly pops between the two mated fingers at the center of the scene. The picture as a whole doesn’t much count: The only thing that we think about is the punchline.

Or maybe the snigger we pretend not to snig at the tiny peanut between Adam’s immense, muscular thighs.

These things are not “overrated” any more than their creators are. They are simply overexposed.

Of course, the symphony a great piece of music – one of the greatest – but heard so often, we cannot absorb it anymore. It is nothing but “dah-dah-dah-DUMB” now.

It is a problem many things face in life: Too much of a good thing and we become vaccinated against it.

Pachelbel’s Canon, Ravel’s Bolero, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. They are all overexposed.

The Nutcracker is a fine ballet, with great music, but when it’s performed 23 times every December, it wears out its welcome for the dance aficionado. It becomes Muzak.

The eye-rolling is a response that many things get, and not just in opera and classical music.

— In pop music, Led Zeppelin’s anthem, Stairway to Heaven, is now a joke, and ripe for snarky parody. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. has been ground into the dust by overuse, and usually for reasons at odds with the song’s actual content.

— The TV show, M*A*S*H, has been in reruns for so long, that the thought of another 30 minutes with Alan Alda can drive us to emigrate to Siberia – where they probably run it dubbed into Russian or Yakut.

— Robert Frost’s Road Not Taken, or Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening are turned into one-dimensional parodies of their author. Both are subtle poems with equivocal readings, but not in the popular mind.

There are others:

— Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal or Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.

— The Seagram’s Building in Manhattan. It has come to stand for all the bland steel-and-glass International Style architecture that followed, but there’s elegance, proportion and detail there.

The Beethoven’s Fifth dilemma even extends to typefaces. Everyone’s computer comes with the Helvetica font installed. It’s everywhere, to the point one designer always calls it the “dread Helvetica.”

But it is an exceptionally well designed typeface, which is exactly why it is so miserably overused.

And more:

— Ahi tuna.

— The New York Yankees.

— The Mona Lisa.

— The Grand Canyon.

The problem is that it isn’t just that familiarity breeds contempt, but that it breeds invisibility. Overexposure itself wouldn’t be a big problem – we could just refrain from programming such things for a while – but something else happens: Wide dispersal of anything in popular culture transmutes it from an experience to a reference. All you have to do is refer to the Hallelujah Chorus and your audience “gets it.”And so, God’s creation of Adam turns into a potato chip ad.

It keeps us skimming along the surface of things.

You have to pay attention, to react deeply enough to get the most out of a poem. Otherwise it becomes possible that The Road Not Taken, or Sylvia Plath’s Daddy become completely so decontextualized that we can refer to a phenomenon without registering the emotions, or understanding its complexity.

Another way of putting it is that the familiar work becomes a shorthand. When we want sad, we go to Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, when we want momentous, we go to Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. Never mind that the originals are complex and layered.

They become a shorthand for “funny music,” or “dramatic music,” or “ironic music.”

When referencing or quoting these things, it’s not about the original anymore, but about a new meaning that’s been given to it. Some of these things – which we may only know as a catch-phrase, joke or a snatch of music – are never considered on their own terms and we forget the quality of the original.

The Godfather, a sprawling multi-part epic, gets reduced to Marlon Brando mumbling. And the image of Marlon Brando mumbling now means something else – a cultural stereotype of the Italian Mafia or the promise and perils of method acting.

So, Beethoven’s Fifth becomes a shorthand of: 1. Classical (i.e. “longhair”) music in general; 2. “Fate knocking at the door;” 3. The granitic monumentality of “Great Art” (and conversely, its ponderousness, compared with pop culture); 4. the triumph of the finale over the hardships of the beginning movement, and a template for symphonies to come for the next hundred years; 5. The morse-code ensign for Victory in WWII (to the point that it even becomes, in altered form, the wartime fanfare at the beginning of Fox films).

It is also the theme song to OCD. (In the seven or so minutes of the symphony’s first movement, you hear the four-note rhythm 382 times.)

So, can we actually hear the damn thing anymore? It takes a concerted effort of will to listen to it “again for the first time.”

But to hear, or see, how good something it is, it has to be more than a tic in the cultural compost pile. You have to actively pay attention. You have to engage. Art is not a warm bath.

Certainly, this is one of the wellsprings of any contemporary art: the need to make art new, fresh and meaningful, to break through the cliches that the older art has become. We need to keep making it new.

Sometimes, that comes in the form of a new performance practice for the older music, as when a Roger Norrington or John Eliot Gardiner takes up the Beethoven Fifth and plays it at race-course speed, glossing over the speed bumps that its composer put there. It gives us a fresh take on an golden oldie.

But is that enough? Perhaps Gardiner misses something essential from the original by tossing out the 200 years of tradition behind it.

There will come a day when the new, zippier performances of 19th-century classics becomes so old hat, a new generation will discover the depth in performances by Wilhelm Furtwangler or Willem Mengelberg. And what now seems old will be fresh once again.

TOP 10 BEETHOVEN FIFTHS

Beethoven’s Fifth – A number of Fifth Symphonies could make this list: Tchaikovsky’s, Sibelius’s, even Mahler’s – at least the Adagietto. But Beethoven’s is the champ, so familiar it is almost impossible to hear anymore.

‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ – The opening “Sunrise” section has become the de facto theme song of any momentous introduction, most famously in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but also for former professional wrestler Ric Flair’s entry into the ring.

‘Nessun Dorma’ – This tenor showpiece from Puccini’s Turandot shows up everywhere from car commercials to the theme song of the 1990 FIFA World Soccer Cup and in so many films: The Killing Fields, and Bend It Like Beckham. Aretha Franklin even sang it for the Grammies.

Pachelbel’s Canon – The bane of classical music radio stations everywhere. When satirist Peter Schickele made up his mock radio station for his PDQ Bach series, he called it WTWP – “Wall-to-Wall Pachelbel.”

‘O Fortuna’ from ‘Carmina Burana’ – The powerful choral piece once expressed Medieval violence in movies such as Excalibur, and the torments of drug addiction in Oliver Stone’s The Doors. Now it sells Gatorade and Old Spice after-shave. It’s everywhere.

Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ – There are 220 CDs available currently: Everyone with a fiddle has recorded it, and there’s even a version for Japanese kotos and another for pennywhistle. Dude, he wrote 600 other concertos. They’re good, too.

Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D-minor – Bach wrote this improvisatory organ work to test new organs; now it tests our patience. It shows up anytime you need “spooky” music in a haunted house, and it is also the “inspiration” for much of the faux-organ music in Phantom of the Opera.

Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ – The most demoniacal offender: Not only has Bolero been repeated endlessly in movies, TV commercials and ice-dancing routines, it repeats endlessly in any performance: The one tune over and over till it drives you nuts. The New York Times suggests Ravel was in early stages of frontotemporal dementia when he wrote it. We give it a “10.”

Hallelujah Chorus – Another movie cliché: When the hero or heroine finally understands, or opens the door to discover something unexpected, cue the Hallelujah Chorus.

‘Adagio for Strings’ – Once voted the “saddest classical” work ever, it has become the movie cliché of all times, giving emotional weight to Platoon, The Elephant Man, Amelie, Lorenzo’s Oil, S1m0ne, and even Michael Moore’s Sicko. The Internet Movie Database lists its use 26 times.

—Richard Nilsen

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