Just now, it’s hard to look at the world without a sharp twist of despair. Across the planet, vast (and increasingly violent) divisions seem to be opening up every day and there’s a rising feeling that the situation isn’t going to improve any time soon. When it all looks so bleak, we naturally search out those things we know can bring us a little comfort.
For me, the reliable shelter in dark times has always been music. It’s my consolation, my anchor and my joy. But a while back, even this lost some of its power to console. My faith in music had a mini-wobble. A wobblette, if you will.
It was a few years ago and I’d wangled a backstage tour of the gorgeous Musikverein in Vienna, the holy of holies for classical music. It’s the sort of place where even the people serving ice cream have triple PhDs in musicology. While I was there, I looked down at my phone and realised it was November 9, the anniversary of Kristallnacht. On spotting the date, I asked if they could tell me what was playing that day in 1938, the year of that brutal pogrom. A tour guide dutifully found the programme and was kind enough to send me a contemporaneous review.
I learnt that Karl Böhm had conducted Anton Bruckner’s Symphony Number 5 that evening. According to the critic in 1938, he’d done it well. Bruckner, a superb 19th-century Austrian composer, had always been a favourite of mine. But it was the reviewer’s final casual comment that threw me. According to him, “a wonderful night was had by all”. “By all”? The words shocked me. Because, as those concert-goers ambled comfortably out of the Musikverein, they’d have walked straight into an obscene carnival of violence against Jews.
All at once, I couldn’t really hear Bruckner any more.
Then, a few weeks ago, I got to attend the magnificent Lucerne Festival in Switzerland. Lucerne is probably the greatest classical musical festival there is, a kind of orchestral Glastonbury with less mud and more trombones. It all takes place at the KKL, a purpose-built, utterly breathtaking concert hall. While I was there, I was super keen to hear one of my heroes, the conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, a dazzling blend of top international musicians. My music BFF Judy got us past the hallowed velvet rope to observe a rehearsal. Yannick was conducting Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. Tentatively, with my ears a-tremble, the first movement began. Yannick is part-scientist, part-sorcerer and wholly himself; proudly and incidentally gay, he has a seemingly spiritual thirst to share his deep connection and honest passion with his players and audiences.
There he was, in front of an inclusive and modern orchestra making music so sublime that I felt time itself had stopped. And at the last crescendo, a moment of lasting epiphany came to me: those who had enjoyed their “wonderful night” as Viennese synagogues burned don’t, and cannot, change what truly great art can be. I understood again that music is never responsible for those that listen. It’s not even responsible for those who write it. But, at its best, it can speak to our finest instincts, not just our love of beauty but also our capacity to exult in complex and diverse humanity. It’s an inclusion that speaks to our very souls.
The lesson was all around Lucerne. Performing elsewhere in the city were the fantastic British Chineke! Orchestra (which has a majority of black and ethnically diverse musicians) as well as Daniel Barenboim conducting a performance of the spectacular West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (made up of Israeli and Arab players). Barenboim, an enduring survivor from an age slowly vanishing beyond the horizon, similarly teaches us that regardless of our background or where we come from, music will forever be a uniting force if we let it.
That audience in 1938 simply did not hear what the music might have told them.
My faith restored, Bruckner at last resumed his place on my playlist. I’m certainly glad to have him back. In times like these, we need all the comfort we can get.
