Posted on 09/18/2005 5:55:05 PM PDT by sitetest
Robert Spano is zooming along in his life as a conductor, the lights all turning green.
Tonight in Symphony Hall, he conducts Mahler's monumental "Resurrection" Symphony and begins his fourth season as music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra — a partnership that increasingly draws national praise.
Robert Spano (photo courtesy of the Atlanta Symphony) Spano comes off a summer at the Seattle Opera, where he led Wagner's four-opera, 16-hour Ring cycle. After more than two months of rehearsal, he led the cycle three times over three weeks — and calls it a life-changing experience. A sign of success: He's already been invited back to Seattle to conduct the Ring in 2009.
We recently caught up with the 44-year-old conductor in a Midtown coffee shop.
Q: You received mostly glowing reviews for your first Ring. How did you feel about it?
A: It felt like a huge marker in my life. Not just as a conductor but as a human being. I feel like a different person. I'm altered and I'm grateful.
Q: What was so transformative?
A: For one thing the physicality, the athleticism of the Ring. In rehearsal, the first time we did Rheingold [Part 1 of the Ring saga] was the first time in my life I've had to conduct for 2½ hours without stopping. I made a point of not getting tired. I quit smoking, which I'd started at 17. I was going to the gym, doing Pilates. I went on a six-meal-a-day eating regimen, smaller meals. I took it very seriously. During the performances, I didn't get tired at all, didn't even think about it. But at intermission, and this was unusual, I'd be completely exhausted, physically and mentally. Sometimes I'd walk into my dressing room and have to lie on the floor to regroup, just so I'd have the energy to continue.
The other thing I hadn't expected, in the two years I spent in serious study [of the Ring score], was that everything took me twice as long to learn as usual. That terrified me. I'm usually a pretty quick study. Here I had to learn a whole new musical language — Wagner's language — which I'd been avoiding most of my life. No matter how hard I studied, I always had a thousand pages to go.
There is something bottomless about the Ring; it's such a vast and strange world. Fifty years before Freud and psychoanalysis, Wagner had it in the Ring. It goes very deep. Everyone who really knows the Ring will tell you that. But until you're inside it yourself, you can't quite imagine how such a thing could be true.
Conducting the Ring also, and this was really fascinating to me, warped my sense of time and space. Act 1 of Götterdämmerung [the fourth Ring opera] is two hours, which is as long as all of [Puccini's] Madama Butterfly, but I thought about it like 'an act of opera,' not in time but as units.
For long stretches I felt like I wasn't in my own body. I felt like I was growing with each performance, more than I'd grown in my entire life of conducting. It was amazing. And ridiculous, in a wonderful way.
Q: Did you take a nice break after Seattle?
A: No, I came right back to Atlanta to start preparing for the new season. I'll admit my first few days back I wasn't too functional. I'm not taking any vacation this year, but next fall [2006] I'm taking a chunk of time off, to compose. I have several pieces I need to finish, and this summer made me all the more aware that composing is a part of my life that I have to pursue. As a kid, when I was 12, I thought of myself as a composer, but later sort of fell into conducting. It's clear to me that returning to composition is something I have to do.
Q: You open the ASO season with Mahler's Second Symphony. It's only about 80 minutes long. Does that now feel short to you?
A: He's the opposite of Wagner; it's so concentrated and focused. Mahler, no fool, gave us a clue to music and meaning, the eternal question. Mahler quotes from Act 2, Scene 2 of Walküre [the second Ring opera]. It's a loveless scene where convention and society choke-hold creativity and the loving possibilities of the individual. I was blown away when I realized that connection. I love that I better understand Wagner through the eyes of his descendants, like Mahler.
Q: Will Atlanta ever share in your Wagner revelations?
A: I'd love to do Tristan und Isolde [with the ASO], maybe done in separate acts, maybe just a single act. That's an opera I have always loved. It's a long way away, but we might be able to pull it off.
Interesting.
I was not really trying to cast Wagner the man as good or evil, more trying to make the point that his operas were a jumping off point for the hodge-podge of racism, mythology, occultism, and cultural trope that was Nazism.
In short, Wagnerism begat Nazism. (or so it would appear from the documentary that I saw and other anecdotal information I have read from time to time).
There is a guy at work that I have not liked for a long time. Recently I found out he was a prominent democrat in the local party. So I said to myself, great, I already don't like the guy, now I have a whole other reason to not like him :)
I feel the same about Wagner. I already didn't like him. Now I have another reason not to.
ping
Also interesting.
As I type I'm listening to Mozart's Great Mass in C minor at a reasonably loud volume.
Words cannot begin to describe it.
That's what does it for me, anyway.
Wagner was an thiest fascinated by the occult and Germanic mythology throughout most of his career. He was, for a long time, a close friend of Frederich Nietzche (sp?). Apparantly Wagner had a falling out with Nietzche and found God late in life, and subsequently wrote Pasrsifal as a redemption-seeking work.
For a good laugh, you should listen to Nietzsche's music; I have a CD of some music he wrote while he was still friendly with Wagner. According to the story I heard, Wagner had to leave the room to hide his guffaws when Nietzsche was playing his new music for the first time on Wagner's piano. Nietzsche certainly had no talents as a music composer, to put it mildly.
Saw a special on Discovery/Times network the other day (I know, I know). It was on occultism in the 3rd Reich. It was actually quite good and made many points not all of them can I summarize here.
Cable TV programs (Discovery, History Channel, etc) are a horrible way to learn about history. Their documentaries are simplistic at best, and often repeat a lot of misinformation, half truths, and downright untrue information. The subject of "Nazis and the Occult" is an especially kooky field overly ripe with questionable assertions and assumptions. These occult ideas were certainly "out there" in the culture back then (just as they are now) but their influence is grossly overestimated. Even gross frauds like Ravenscroft's "Spear of Destiny" are uncritically accepted as factual. Separating fact from fiction in this area isn't easy, and these cable TV documentaries don't give the viewer any hint about the problems and complexities involved in sifting the evidence. It's good entertainment, but not necessarily good history.
LOL.
BUMP!
As a fairly knowledgable person about history I feel able to filter such cable TV shows through the prism of what I already know from other sources. I would say that taking any single source at face value is always hazardous be it book, movie, TV show or anecdote. I think if you've read dozens if not hundreds of books on the general subject of WWII history in particular and 20th century in general, the hazard is not nearly so great. Nobody produces an historical work without wanting to express an historical opinion - that's why people do history. The only thing one can do is to put all the sources into a pot and stir well - hopefully what emerges is at least an approximation to the "truth".
FWIW the symphony has really improved (I think) under Gerard Schwartz, whatever the London Symphony Orchestra may think of him. Benaroya Hall turned out to be an incredible venue. Nobody walks out these days...
Great post, thanks. Almost makes we want to listen to Wagner. Mahler, yes, any time. Wagner still seems awfully heavy to me...I'll have to try again.
It's only rock and roll.
You have to be genius level to be a good conductor. Same way Emeril is a genius. His show is boring cliché to me but last night I relaxed and noticed how smoothly he "orchestrated". You try cooking and talking and ten other things at the same time!
And tell Tchaikovsky the news
I am a devotee of military marches as well. The Germans easily had the best. The Panzerlied is right up there, along with the classic "Russlandlied" and "Panzer Rollen im Afrika vor."
I absolutely agree that the Resurrection cannot be rated highly enough. It runs the gamut of despair, longing, hope and triumph. Each movement is staggering in its vision. I'm not sure what to call the themes, but personally my favorite moments in the work are the "remembering lost happiness" theme in the 1st movement (that sad rising theme that occurs throughout), the whole Urlicht, and the moment the organ speaks in the glorious finale. I've never been to a live performance, but I hope to someday. I never miss a Mahler concert if I can help it. His music has transformed my life.
I'm also a fan of your screen-name. I read a work on the French Revolution not too long ago, "Citizens." It was superb and remains an area of history in which I am deeply interested.
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