They are some of the greatest masterpieces ever written by humankind but what does the future hold for such specialist art forms as classical music and opera? What relevance do they hold in modern society and what distinguishes a truly great artist? On a fine spring morning in classical music critic for the Financial Times, Richard Fairman’s, London home we endeavour to answer these questions. Fairman, in his generous and enthusiastic manner, begins by answering my first question:
Which are the greatest contemporary names? Joshua Bell?
Still looking as ageless as his artistry, which sparkles just as it did when he emerged as a violinist on the international stage back in the 1980s.
Akiko Suwanai?
A highly skilled violinist. Violinists are great, they explode on the scene aged 16 or less and they are great players but by the time they are forty they have done everything. They have nowhere to go and a lot of the older violinists just disappear slowly. The pianists are almost around the other way. Pianists on the other hand have to slog on and don’t achieve notoriety until much later. It is funny how it is different in that way. Stephen Hough is one of the most inspiring pianists alive today. In fact, he is more than a pianist, as he is also a composer, blogger (for the Daily Telegraph) and lover of theology and hats! And Piotr Anderszewski takes audiences off to another realm.
But if it is all classical music, how can the instrument make so much difference?
Well, I think it’s partly because there is so much more for pianists to play. The repertoire is vast, so they keep on learning new pieces and they renew themselves so it’s as though they’re ever young. They are coming out aged 70 and still giving you new things and it keeps their brain alive, it keeps their technique alive. Whereas violinists do not have that. They have so few concertos that they can play, that they can become stale so quickly.
Why is it that there is so much more music for pianos?
Well I think more composers were pianists.
Was it a more popular instrument in the time of the great composers?
That is a tricky thing to say. What you do have is certain composers and the most obvious one is Chopin (the anniversary of his birth is this year which is a very big event, there will be recitals everywhere). He was a piano virtuoso and so he basically only wrote music for piano. He was followed by Liszt, and later Rachmaninoff also did the same thing. Liszt wrote music that wasn’t for piano and Rachmaninoff wrote more still, but for all that, they were still pianist virtuosos. There were violinist virtuosos but they weren’t great composers. Maybe that’s just a coincidence. But it does mean something very important for the musicians and the way they develop. So we have lots of young violinists – most of them female, which is interesting.
In recent years there has definitely been a surge of hugely popular young, female violinists. Is it just part of our modern culture that we embrace young attractive women?
There have been a couple of cases where that’s all there was; where looks and age have been used to promote them. Whereas I remember the press office of Sony calling me when Midori came on the scene and said, “She’s not just another chick with a violin and a swimsuit” – and she wasn’t. She could play really, really well.
What is it about classical music that kept you enraptured for so many years?
The first thing is that there is so much of it. There is so much of it that is wonderful. I fell for classical music when I was about seventeen.
What was it that made you fall for classical music as opposed to contemporary music?
I was a pianist myself and this is something that makes music slightly different from some of the other arts, when you’re a child you actually start practising it yourself. Certain arts are closed to you as a child but so many of us learn the piano, or whatever, and so you immediately start on it. I actually didn’t like the music, like so many child pianists, I didn’t actually listen to music at all and making that transition between somebody who does it and somebody who listens to it is actually something that a lot of young musicians don’t make. But I made it and the reason was that I was just the right age when I was taken to concerts.
I wasn’t too young. I think 17 – 18 is the youngest you want to be. We went on school trips to the Royal Festival Hall (London) and so we were introduced to music as being a social experience with all our friends, a fun outing where we had a really great time and in a way it was so like the ways in which young people are introduced to contemporary music now, it was a sociable experience. And of course we had had the grounding in the music already so we could cope with the music we were listening to. It all came together in a way and I loved it. Couldn’t stop going to concerts. So I do think it is very important how you introduce young people to classical music. It is after all only the same as contemporary music.
Why do you think there is such a divide between classical and contemporary music?
Well there shouldn’t be. People think there is but that’s the problem. I think you’re quite right, the whole world thinks there’s this big divide when in fact there isn’t, but most people never discover this.
Do you think they follow the same rules in terms of melodies and harmonies?
Yes. There was a television series by Howard Goodall, who writes lots of film scores, and it was just about treating music as music. One episode was on The Beatles song Penny Lane because he thought it was a great piece of music and he took it apart as melody, harmony, etc. and he showed you that it was more complex than a Schubert song. And it was. I watched and I was completely convinced. I came out and thought, “Yes, he is absolutely right”. It is only music and that is a very sophisticated piece of composition. Of course it is a short piece – most popular music is in short pieces, so there is a big question there on concentration. Most classical music pieces are very long and that is the big difference. The actual music is the same. It’s made up of the same things, melodies, harmonies, the same instruments, yes!
How has classical music and opera fared in recent times?
In the 1970s or 1980s classical music went down a very dark alleyway. Composers were very highly sponsored by the state, particularly in Germany and central Europe, to write pieces that nobody wanted to hear. It was what you would call “plinkety-plonk” music. It was so technically difficult to play and to listen to. You sat through it, and it was like Stravinsky said of Hindemith, “succulent like chewing cardboard,” but this was worse. Hindemith is a little bit dry but this was really something only one person in a million could get to grips with.
The composers no longer had to connect to an audience because they got paid anyway by the state: there was so much money for the arts. They could write anything, and they did. In Europe and the United States in the past 20 years there hasn’t been so much money for the arts in that respect and the result is that we have a whole new generation of composers who have to write pieces that will have an audience. They want to have a full hall and so the result is that classical music is becoming more alive again and these younger composers are relevant.
Recently a whole day was given over to one young American called Nico Muhly who’s writing an opera and everybody says that he really wants an audience, he writes on contemporary themes. The younger composers that want to get through are very contemporary. So I do think it is relevant and alive again after a brief period where it almost died.
And how is classical music doing on an international scale?
Think of the young musicians in China. They say that, because of the example of Lang Lang and other pianists like Yundi Li, China has been swept by this desire to teach all the children piano and even families that have very little money will fight to get the money so that their child can learn the piano. What’s the result going to be in 15 years when all those kids that have learnt piano come pouring onto the market – because by the law of averages a few tens of thousands of them are going to be pretty good! The take up of piano lessons there is way ahead of anything we have probably ever had in the West. Of course Lang Lang being the first had to come to the West in order to become famous, otherwise the Chinese people wouldn’t have thought he was anything special.
He needed endorsement from the West?
Yes. But Yundi didn’t because now there is confidence. Lang Lang paved the way and they are now willing to accept a Chinese pianist who hadn’t yet had the endorsement from the West.
There are so many exciting things happening in China at the moment.
Yes. When will Chinese opera singers appear, in the Western sense of the word? We get to be enthusiastic about their opera just as they are enthusiastic about ours. I’ve just watched the opening of Expo 2010 Shanghai and it was accompanied by music from Puccini’s ‘Turandot’. Perhaps that is a special case, as it is the most famous opera actually set in China, but I can’t help thinking that the choice of music points to the way ahead. Japan has long been hugely enthusiastic about opera and Western classical music in general – Eri Nakamura is a delightful young Japanese soprano who has been winning hearts since she came to join the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme at the Royal Opera House. China is surely next on the list.
They have already built their fantastic opera house, named the National Centre for the Performing Arts, in Beijing and now they will need operas and singers to fill it. I don’t know whether Chinese operas will be written in the Western style, but I am sure that Chinese singers will start to come forward in greater numbers. When you think of the huge population China has, that should be a marvellous boost for opera audiences in the future.
What is it about classical music and opera that makes it relevant to contemporary society?
That is much more difficult to answer of course. I’m trying to think it through myself. It certainly wasn’t the case that I liked all music or even all classical music. I only started by finding certain pieces that I liked. I would say that it was given the age I was, that what we were being introduced to was the emotions of other people and they were expressing things that we hadn’t yet felt at 17 – and that the language they were being expressed in was universal, one we could speak and we could understand.
So suddenly here were all these people, all adults of course, almost all dead white males, telling us about these amazingly deep and passionately felt emotions that we had never felt because we hadn’t had their experiences. We weren’t old enough. We hadn’t fallen in love. We hadn’t been broken hearted to the extent that they were, because at seventeen it lasts a day and then it’s over, but for some of these people it hadn’t lasted only a day, it was a life-changing experience. And suddenly there I was, and we all were, being hit by these massively deep emotions.
It was as though you had sat on a beach for 17 years and along came this tsunami and you were swept away by it. And the great thing about music is that there is so much of it, so you never quite lose that because there is always another composer that you never really got to grips with – and of course she or he has their own message and their own new feelings and emotions that you haven’t come across in the others before. So while your exploring does tail off slightly, because of course you tend to hear most of the greatest works at the beginning, there is always some more to come.
I think the greatest thing about music is that there is always a song you have never heard and you will always find a song that is like nothing you have ever heard before.
Exactly! There are always thousands of songs you’ve never heard. And you think people can’t keep composing, but they do, and they have new things to tell you. So rapture is quite a decent word. I think we can live with that because that’s what you feel when you are hit with that tsunami!
by Nicola Kavanagh
From the Glass archive – issue two – Rapture