Simon Rattle and the non-androgynous Tristan

(rehearsal of A Flowering Tree with Simon Rattle in Berlin)

Thursday night I go into San Francisco, driving over the perilous new “S-curve” of the Bay Bridge, to see Simon Rattle spend two intense hours rehearsing students in orchestral music from “Tristan and Isolde.” I have not seen him since December of 2006 when he conducted A Flowering Tree in Berlin, and I’m very much looking forward to being with him after so long.

I get there late of course, and even before I open the door to the hall I can hear a cello section playing that familiar, long-breathed 6/8 melody from the prelude. Wagner’s musical personality is so powerful, so persuasive that you need hear only a bar or even a chord change to be immediately drawn in, caught within the irresistible force field of his presence.

I had my first experience with “Tristan” when I was 29 years old. I was living a Spartan bachelor life in a tiny cottage a block from the ocean, teaching during the day and spending a great deal of time alone at night, trying to figure out who I was as an artist. I’ve written in “Hallelujah Junction” about the big “Götterdämmerung” moment I had while driving in the Sierras. But what I didn’t say was that when I got back to town from that mountain excursion it was “Tristan” that I sought out and began to learn. For the better part of a year I hauled around the fat Dover edition of the full score with its annoying Aubrey Beardsley painting on the cover, a vision of decadent androgyny a universe removed from the swirling lifeblood running through the veins of Wagner’s impassioned lovers.

Wagner attracts words like warm flesh on a humid night attracts mosquitoes. There must be as much tedious exegesis on him as there is on Proust or Marx or Joyce. So when it comes to his music I should perhaps shut up and simply say I listened. But the urge to describe one’s reactions is difficult to resist.

Simon is a musician of lightning-quick reflexes and an endlessly inquisitive and comprehensive mind. I don’t know of anyone in the world of classical music who has the range that he possesses. He is able to give a stylistically detailed and musically thrilling performance of Haydn or Mozart with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment one week and then turn around and do Ligeti’s Violin Concerto or a new Thomas Adès piece the next. He is a great Messiaen conductor. When coming to town he’ll often call ahead and suggest we join him for a visit to Yoshi’s to hear jazz. I never heard either the Pelléas and Mélisande nor the Idomeneo he did with Peter Sellars, but apparently they were memorable.

He tells me he lives in the shadow of Carlos Kleiber. This a genuinely modest remark and doubtless sincere, but compared to Simon’s, Kleiber’s range of repertoire was a sliver of micron-thin density.

Some listeners will crab about what they deem Simon’s overly hands-on shaping of the music. A New York critic last week described him “laboring to extract performances forcibly from the players”. But those responses more often than not come from minds that don’t wish to be jostled out of their comfort zones. In truth I don’t know of a single musician who more regularly locates the core of a work’s meaning, who asks the right questions, than Simon does.

His performance of the Sibelius 7th in Davies Hall some seven or eight years ago was a watershed event for my son Sam, who at the time was a teenager uncertain about whether to become a musician. The Rattle Mahler Fifth that’s available on DVD is a terrifying rollercoaster ride through the full bandwidth of human emotion.

For years he has remained my choice for French repertoire (even over Boulez). After a night in Lyon eighteen years ago that featured some serious drinking of armagnac, he took his throbbing head and groggy eyes onto the podium of—I kid you not—L’Auditorium Maurice Ravel and proceeded to lead his Birmingham band through a morning rehearsal of “Daphnis” that swept me into another universe of color, melancholy and feverish sensuality. My own throbbing head switched its throb from pain to ecstasy.

And, as I was reminded Thursday night, he goes to places in Wagner’s music that probably no other living musician has a road map for.

So Thursday night was the way I like to have my musical experiences these days, in unplanned, spontaneous encounters—the raw rather than the cooked. I knew that the next night, at Davies Hall with the Berlin Philharmonic, would certainly be an event, but here in this rehearsal hall, watching him work with a student orchestra of uninitiated kids there was actually more of a potential for witnessing real revelations.

Like Peter Sellars, another artist of depth and imagination, Simon is also a person of rare generosity and kindness. Thursday night could have been a precious evening free for him in the middle of a long, exhausting US tour with the Berlin Philharmonic. If it were my night off I would probably have spent it collapsed on my hotel room bed. But Simon agrees to spend two very intense hours on Thursday night trying to pull meaningful music out of an orchestra of not very skilled young musicians.

It’s a “workshop” with the emphasis on “work.” The first time through every new passage in the Wagner appears dead on arrival. The phrases are stillborn, colorless, without shape or direction. Of course part of this may just be the deer-in-the-headlights bedazzlement of a bunch of conservatory kids who suddenly find themselves only a few feet away from one of the greatest conductors of all time.

They have trouble following him, lurching ahead in a misguided attempt to catch up with his beat rather than moving confidently a millisecond behind it. A more ordinary conductor would have drilled these students on playing together, but Simon spends a good fifteen minutes just trying to draw a sound he wants out of the celli, trying to make it come awake, arouse it from its lifeless condition. Most of the rehearsal is about making the sound come alive, and I note, most of it is focused on the strings.

The young players are not listening to each other. The phrases at first sound like a chain of barely related pitches. They seem unaware of the magnetic pull of the harmonies beneath them. He has to make the players become conscious, find the breath in the arc, point the line to where the harmony wants to lead it. They don’t play like they love the music. But perhaps they are just too young, not aware of what it means. “Tristan” is, after all, forbidden fruit. Its topic may not be man’s first disobedience but it certainly must be his second.

He works incredibly hard, alternating humor with tireless urging. The sound in the Conservatory concert hall moves in and out of focus, occasionally convincing the listener but then suddenly becoming blemished by bad intonation or unbalanced timbres. Even with all these problems, it’s impossible not to be moved by this music. I think once again how very very serious Wagner can be, serious because when Tristan approaches Isolde on board the ship for the first time to those grave ¾ rhythms, you know that they both are already headed down the chute, on their catastrophic way to breaking a profound social covenant. The music tells us that this can only end in pain, remorse, wrenching heartache and death.

I’m not even sure I understood this myself when I first took the piece up at a tender age. Perhaps I had a clue of its depth of meaning, but I hadn’t lived enough then to really be conscious of the powers of understanding that this greatest of musical psychologists possessed.

I’m pulled like a satellite into the orbit of the music. My ear traces over and over again the chromatic descents in the bass lines, and I follow a pitch, any pitch, to hear it move from being a root in one bar to being a flatted seventh in another to a non-chord tone in yet another. The chords churn and roil. Amazing how Wagner can suddenly stop everything and baldly present a naked dominant seventh in root position. Then suddenly the seventh chord is completely redefined—it turns out to have been a chimera, a passing moment before a foray into deeper, infinitely darker business.

Afterwards Simon tells me how audiences at first didn’t understand the ending to Brahms’ Fourth Symphony because in 1885 hardly anyone knew the Mozart G minor symphony. They had little context for a symphony that ended tragically. Only a few people at the time understood the depth of Mozart, and those were mostly composers like Wagner and Mahler.

The next night we go to Davies and hear him conduct the Schoenberg arrangement of the Brahms g minor piano quartet. Simon believes in it and makes as good a case as anyone for its worth. But I remain uneasy with it. Even with the Berlin Phil playing it the arrangement still feels thick and dense, like a heavy winter fabric thrown over a young, lithe body. The solutions for representing the high piano writing of the original—the very un-Brahmsian Eb clarinet in particular—seem anomalous to me, and the xylophone in the razzmatazz Gypsy finale still sounds to me like “Danse macabre.” Strange, because Schoenberg could be such a brilliant orchestrator, as he is in the Violin Concerto and Variations for Orchestra (and of course Gurrelieder and Pierrot).

I’m sorry to miss the next night’s performance of the full orchestra version of the Opus 9 Chamber Symphony, something I haven’t heard since my college days in Boston. But Ingram Marshall is afoot, hunting coccoras and performing “Alcatraz” and “Eberbach” with the photographer Jim Bengston in the south Bay, so we give the Viennese composer a rain check and go out to support one of our own.