CONNOISSEUR
April 1987

THE LEIPZIG SOUND
Why Music Needs the Gewandhaus Orchestra
By Matthew Gurewitsch

"You've heard the joke?" the distinguished professor wants to know. "At the Berlin Philharmonic, they play old fiddles and drive new cars. With us, it's the other way around." How much true history fits into a little quip. Gerhard Bosse has served for upwards of thirty years as first concertmaster of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, in Leipzig, a city only ninety miles from Berlin, but on the far side of the wall. From the late nineteenth century to 1945, the fortunes of the two orchestras ran parallel, even to the point of sharing music directors. Since the war, though, the Berlin Philharmonic, at home in West Germany's showcase exclave, has reveled in prosperity unknown in the East. Under the leadership of the glacial Herbert von Karajan, it has evolved into the very prototype of the late-twentieth-century symphony orchestra, its aesthetic suitable to brave, new, futuristic worlds of glass and steel. If musical excellence could be measured in personal status symbols, the Gewandhaus would make a shabby showing indeed. As it is, the orchestra places in the front rank of international ensembles. Gewandhauskapellmeister Kurt Masur, the fifty-nine-year-old Brahms lookalike who has shepherded the orchestra since 1970, sits in his spacious office at Karl-Marx-Platz. "Tradition," he says. "That is our capital."

Given the current state of the musical world, the value placed on that capital can only rise. Tradition here means many things: at the simplest level, roots reaching far back in time. The city of Leipzig put a band of Stadtpfeifer--municipal pipers--on the payroll in the fifteenth century. Coffeehouses in the eighteenth century hosted the rival musical circles of Bach and Telemann. In 1743, private sponsors founded an orchestra society; in 1781, it moved into a building called the Gewandhaus, which gave the orchestra the name it has been known by since. The tradition of the Gewandhaus encompasses the authority of long experience and continuity but also a wholeheartedly progressive spirit that marked the institution in its proudest years, under such starry music directors as Felix Mendelssohn (Gewandhauskapellmeister from 1835 to 1847), Arthur Nikisch (1895-1922), and Wilhelm Furtwängler (1922-28).

Listeners in the West sense the Gewandhaus tradition first of all in the orchestra's distinctive sound, a sound that links us to the century-plus-a-decade bracketing Beethoven's First Symphony (1800) to Mahler's Ninth Symphony (1909). In that expansionist and eventful age, the concert hall was part temple, part parliament. Music spoke from heart to heart. Any orchestra so charged with that time's living presence is bound to have a cherished place in one's affections, especially since the number of such orchestras is dwindling fast. The phonograph and the jet plane have made the world of music both a larger and a smaller place. Now ace instrumentalists from New York or from Tokyo can drop into vacant chairs like computer chips into a board. Once anyone anywhere can hear anything, everything starts to sound the same.

The Vienna Philharmonic presents one exception. No matter who is conducting them, the players retain a candlelight-on-satin sheen all their own. For many years, a second exception has been the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, but with the recent departure of the Dutch maestro Bernard Haitink and his replacement by the young Italian Riccardo Chailly (a glass-and-steel internationalist if ever there was one), the Concertgebouw seems fated to yield its place as st!ndard-bearer in the core repertoire to Masur and the Gewandhaus. In recent seasons, the East Germans have come to these shores bearing the complete symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms--the Beethoven taut and dramatic, the Brahms majestic. We have had samples of their Bruckner (ruminative) and Mahler (mordant). This month, they will visit this country again, on the first leg of what asur ca,ls their first Weltumsegelung--a voyage around the world.

The conductor likes to think of his ensemble as an "espressivo orchestra," and the phrase points to what are the outstanding attributes of the Gewandhaus: spontaneity--and its warm, rich resonance. The principal coloration comes from the strings, especially from the dark glow of the cellos. The violas blend into that deep shade, not, as is commoner, into the penumbra of the violins. Supporting them all is the mighty array of double basses, ranged like biblical giants, with resonance to match. Against the weft of the strings, the brass stand out with a mellow fullness, the winds with lean and plangent clarity.

The total sound is, in the most honorable sense, the sound of yesteryear. "Some people don't think our method is good," says Johannes Forner, a music scholar closely associated with the orchestra. "They feel it is better always to have new influences. But we think it is best to preserve a basic sound by passing it on from teacher to student. The Vienna Philharmonic does it this way, too, but it's unusual. This way, you don't have to keep explaining the same things all the time."

Close to 90 percent of the players come from Leipzig's own Musikhochschule Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, which Mendelssohn founded for the express purpose of having leading players train their own successors. Turnover is slow. The few open positions will be filled, after due deliberation, when the right player appears at the advertised audition. "Basically," Forner says, "it's a lifetime job. If a flutist loses his teeth, well ... But otherwise ..."

When a visitor suggests that the technical accomplishment in Leipzig, though at a high international standard, is not the last word in razzle-dazzle, Masur offers no apologies. "Technical perfection is always elusive," he says. "Our musicians do not play only in the concert hall but also for the opera and at church services. It would be easier if they did not circulate that way. It can happen that I play the same piece with completely different forces from one year to the next. As it is, the players never lose their joy in the music. We play with devotion, and we take risks. A listener can always tell whether you're playing in a creative spirit. And I think that if we are giving the music all we can, an occasional speck of dust doesn't matter."

Ralf Götz, a young, dark-eyed French horn soloist whose mastery Carnegie Hall audiences have hailed with loud ovations, admits that much of his inspiration comes from other orchestras and, without prompting, names a historic rival. "I am always learning from what I hear," he says. "It is no good just to stew in your own juice. In the classic repertoire, the brass of the Berlin Philharmonic certainly stand out. They are stronger than we are. We are more restrained--and in modem pieces, we really can't compare."

On the other hand, the Leipzig ensemble has this advantage: they played what we now call the classics--notably the three B's--when they were brand-new. J. S. Bach is linked to the city in a double fashion. He spent nearly thirty years there as the choirmaster of the church of Saint Thomas; and it was Mendelssohn who resurrected him from long oblivion. As for Beethoven, the burghers of Leipzig took up his symphonies virtually as fast as he could write them. The Gewandhaus played the Fifth within two months of its Vienna premiere. (In Berlin, they waited fifteen years.) Before any other orchestra thought to do so, the Gewandhaus played all nine Beethoven symphonies as a cycle--in the composer's lifetime. Starting in the 1850s, Brahms played his concerti and conducted his symphonies at the Gewandhaus. And that is just the beginning. Besides introducing his own music, Mendelssohn championed his friend Robert Schumann. Bruckner's Seventh Symphony had its world premiere in Leipzig. So, posthumously (in 1839), did Schubert's Ninth, which the Vienna Philharmonic Society had rejected as unperformable and the world now knows, with colossal understatement, as the "Great" C Major.

Last winter, the Schubert showed up in Leipzig again, on a sold-out subscription series called "World Premieres at the Gewandhaus," on a bill with two short mood pieces (On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, Summer Night on the River; first presented in 1913) by the eccentric British colorist Frederick Delius and the new "concerto for orchestra" Die Windsbraut (The Bride of the Winds) by the East German composer Siegfried Matthus. Laid out on a grand scale not dwarfed by Schubert's, the Matthus score had been heard the previous spring in Munich; now Masur, to whom it is dedicated, was leading it for the first time, in a revised version that technically counts as yet another world premiere. What better occasion to sample the full range of Gewandhaus traditions?
On Monday morning, Masur is taking the orchestra through the first of four three-hour rehearsals for the program they will play on Thursday and Friday. Though the stage is full, only about half of the Gewandhaus players are present. Except for the three first concertmasters, who do not play in the opera or at church, the full membership serves at both those locations as well as in the concert hall. On their own time, they all play chamber music, too. Many belong to one or more of twenty specialized smaller groups; and anyone is free to start another. "You never fall into daily routine," observes Hiltrud Ilg, a first violinist who has played with the Gewandhaus for twenty years, a bright, articulate woman who in a land of grays wears crimson and against steep odds maintains a discreet cosmopolitan chic. "Flexibility is one of our key strengths. Thanks to playing chamber music, we're used to hearing ourselves and our colleagues. That makes you play with commitment. If you always play in the full orchestra, you must never stand out for doing badly or for doing well. Working in small groups makes you capable of a supreme effort. If you play in a detached way, you can't ever give anything extra. If you play in a committed way, you can always hold something back. We combine commitment and discipline."

These qualities are never in doubt as the orchestra launches into Schubert's Great C Major, but Masur has particular fine points in mind. For such a big bear of a man, he cuts a very light-footed figure. Since a car accident several years ago, he has found it uncomfortable to hold a baton, and he rarely uses one. The beat of the music often courses through his whole body; he tends to pump from the knees. As one notices when one shakes his hand, an outer finger is still locked in a rigid curl, but the cues he gives are clean and expressive. And he is eloquent with his eyes.

"Trombones!" he calls out in the first movement. "Be careful not to start flat and end sharp." And to the violins, in the second movement: "Don't just accompany. The oboe solo has to stand out against something fierce!" In the scherzo, he asks for "more singing, less dramatics." In the gorgeous, cataractlike torrents of the finale, he wants more-chiseled detail and a broader sweep. "Remember where you're headed! Don't play the bar lines! ... The fortissimi must be much more of an outburst! ... Violoncelli, a small request. You're rushing the crescendo too much. Keep it a bit sly... Just the strings! Like pins here, like pins! ... Horns, even at fortissimo, keep it elegant. Don't scream so. It sounds really vulgar... The clarinets are wonderful. Please keep it just that way."

Masur calls a break. The violins clack to the floor like June bugs shaken from a tree, and the maestro steps down to comment on the Gewandhaus and its philosophy. "In the West, there is a high demand for perfection and economy--which means there are few rehearsals and many performances. So, in rehearsals, technical perfection is the m!in thin'. Here, we can take more time to enter into the spirit of a work. The goals: musicality, spontaneity, and an intellectual grasp of the material."

The cellist Hartmut Brauer, head of the musicians union at the Gewandhaus and a member of the orchestra for ten years, puts it another way: "I want a concert to be alive. It's okay to hear a mistake. What I care about is living people making music like musicians. You can't always deliver the technical perfection people expect on a record--but sometimes you can do better. Those are the Sternstunden--the hours under a lucky star. And you have to play in such a way that they remain possible."
Leipzig is not an inviting place to visit. Thousands come each year, as they have for centuries, for the trade fairs. What might they see in an idle hour between industrial chemicals, heavy machinery, and communications technology? The Thomaskirche, where Bach worked, and where the chorus he led still sings on Fridays, Saturdays, and the high holy days. But four decades after the bombs fell, Mendelssohn's and Robert and Clara Schumann's houses, for which the city's musical institutions have vague plans, are still unfit to receive visitors. The museum--unregarded and virtually unfrequented--has a handful of masterpieces: a theatrical yet harrowing Crucifixion, by Cranach the Younger, with demons swirling at the foot of the cross; Hans Baldung Grien's The Seven Ages, the ages represented by almond-eyed females, from babe to crone; an Isle of the Dead, of Arnold Böcklin, more hypnotic by far than the same artist's similar canvas that hangs in the West. The zoo is a good one, with frisky tiger cubs and red pandas tumbling in their enclosures; and literary scholars can always lift a glass at Auerbach's Keller, where Goethe laid a diabolical scene in Faust. The newly restored Nikolaikirche, with pale-green palm leaves shooting from pillar to vault, affords an unexpected oasis of light and peace. Otherwise, the city is a jumble of old structures that survived the war and newish concrete boxes thrown up since. Local industry, inefficient car motors, and low-grade fuels fill the atmosphere with pungent fumes that sting the throat and eyes. The only (more or less) fresh air is indoors. The freshest air of all is in the Gewandhaus; the building has the luxury, rare in those parts, of high-grade climate control.

Completed in 1981, the latest Gewandhaus is the first concert hall to have risen in East Germany since the war. It perpetuates the name of the orchestra's first permanent home, in use from 1781 to 1884, upstairs at a true Gewandhaus (house of cloth), the place where eighteenth-century merchants gathered for the Leipzig fair would display their wares. Above the podium, the sponsors inscribed a motto from Seneca: "Res severa verum gandium" (True joy is a serious business). The sentiment stuck; the orchestra took the tag along to each of its new houses. The second, the so-called New Gewandhaus, which had nothing to do with cloth merchants and was the model for Symphony Hall in Boston, was destroyed in air raids in 1944. From 1946 until the opening of the present Gewandhaus, the orchestra played in a converted meeting hall at the zoo. The current hall--not dissimilar in general layout to West Berlin's Philharmonie, where Karajan leads the Berlin Philharmonic--has an elliptical floor plan and seating that encircles the stage. It is one of those fortunate rooms where everything was done right.

Wemer Seltmann, a solo bassoonist who has played with the Gewandhaus Orchestra for thirty-five years, is convinced that there is no better house anywhere. "If you are going to play music from every period, the hall must radiate calm. This is a good place to play. You know, there are always two acoustics--one for the musicians, one for the public. For the musicians, what makes it good is that you can hear one another, and that the sound doesn't change whether the hall is empty or full.

"Here, for the musician, there is hardly any difference at all in the sound with or without the audience," he continues. "That gives the conductors and the players great control. We feel it twice as much when we come back from a tour. You get used to a good thing fast.

"But there's something else. You can see everyone in the hall from anywhere. On the platform, the hall feels small, intimate. That's good for the listeners, too. It makes you feel that you're taking part in the concert. We have to preserve the specific experience, the direct contact to people making music. No technical medium can ever be a substitute for that."

"We are so lucky here," chimes in Ulla Ackner, the head of the orchestra's public relations office, who serves up hard facts with a heavy sauce of ideological self-congratulation. "We have no state interference. The mayor of Leipzig [technically the employer of all 200 musicians and 240 other employees of the self-governing Gewandhaus union] would never dream of telling Masur what to play. There is no need to woo people for their money the way we have seen in the United States. There's no dictatorship of old ladies--no offense to old ladies. Attendance is 500,000 a year, in a city of only 600,000. The audience and the orchestra have a dialectical relationship. We can and do play a lot of contemporary music. The audiences trust that if Masur has chosen something, it must have substance. We don't have to think in terms of the box office." A skeptical visitor wonders quietly how long the state would lay off if the box office did not confirm the cordiality of that dialectical relationship.
In the rehearsals through the rest of the week, Masur continues to file and polish the Schubert. The Delius tone poems practically take care of themselves. "We'll have to let the cuckoo peek through a little more here and there," Masur smiles at the end of an early run-through that has come off with liquescent tenderness. The new Matthus score presents a real challenge. Inspired by Max Ernst's painting of the same name, Die Windsbraut conjures up nature as creator and destroyer in tempestuous sound images that may well make their way into the international repertoire. (Masur has already given its American premiere, with the New York Philharmonic.) The orchestra's assurance at the first reading is little short of phenomenal. The brass, which can be chancy, are in fighting form. The tuba sounds forth as firm as granite; the trumpets chase effortlessly through florid riffs. The hall quivers with the buzz of the double basses and the punch of the timpani. But Masur wants more. He is at his strictest, though never brusque. "Not so blurry! Observe the rests precisely!" Everyone sits up at attention. All of a sudden, a sharp attack. The winds scream fearlessly as the strings flood down in icy streams. Can this be the "traditional" Gewandhaus?

"We'll need more sound on the harp glissando," the maestro notes. Cornelia Seehafer, looking as angelic as her instrument, answers, "I know--but if I play full-out in all the runthroughs, I'll have blisters for the concert." She is authorized to save. Even at the final rehearsal, with the composer in attendance and a television crew swarming like locusts, she takes the passage lightly. Masur does not so much as issue a reminder. ("I know I can count on her," Masur explains later in the day.) After a brief powwow with Matthus and a close look at two or three trouble spots, Masur calls a break.

When the players reconvene, it is back to Schubert and a few meticulous pitch adjustments. At the close of the quiet second movement, Masur pinches off the final chord with a delicate, sure gesture as if picking a ripe peach. "It would be lovely," he says quietly, "if the first cellos could make the passage"--and he gives the reference--"sound quite effortless, completely relaxed. I'd appreciate it if we could play that little bit again." The effect achieved, he asks for the final few pages, which proceed uninterrupted in a burst of beauty as if for the players' own sheer enjoyment. Masur bows to the orchestra. "Toi toi toi," he says. "Good luck. Until this evening." The rehearsal is over, an hour ahead of schedule. Now all the Gewandhaus players need is the audience. The prospects for a Sternstunde are good.
Music is a universal language, they say, and talent is a passport. Certainly it has proved so for Masur. He is in constant demand as a guest conductor the world over. Americans hear him often, with such orchestras as the New York Philharmonic and the Boston and Chicago Symphonies. Still, his first allegiance is to the Gewandhaus, where he chooses to spend six to seven solid months a year--by industry standards, an extraordinarily high proportion of time.

And the musicians? Not many of them could pull up stakes and go solo into the free world. Still, ask them what they wish for, and you will discover precious few malcontents. Heiko Schumann, a cellist and one of the orchestra's three newest recruits, cannot think of a single thing. Christian Funke, one of the three first concertmasters, can. He wishes that he could play the concertos he plays in Leipzig when the orchestra is on tour but recognizes the commercial necessity that compels presenters in international centers to demand big-name guests. Uwe Kleinsorge, an oboist and head of the entire Gewandhaus union, wishes more top-notch students would take up winds--and that Masur would use his prestige to attract more top-notch guest conductors from the West; he names Claudio Abbado, Seiji Ozawa, Zubin Mehta, Lorin Maazel. "It's a problem of money. In Salzburg I heard that Chailly gets $15,000 for a concert. We have no dollars, no West German marks. That might be our whole budget for a year." Gerhard Bosse, the retiring first concertmaster, notes that Western copyright owners of popular twentieth-century scores, including several by Richard Strauss, charge rental fees the Gewandhaus cannot afford. Hiltrud Ilg wishes she had more time for her family and to pursue other interests: "But it's my own doing. I don't have to teach. I don't have to play chamber music. It's my own doing that I have too little time." Hartmut Brauer hopes the new Gewandhaus will stand forever: "The last one was destroyed, as you know. If that happened again, it would be ... not so nice. I wish for peace. Everybody does, so people never say it; but maybe it's important to say it once in a while."

And, of course, all the wind and brass players want better, new instruments and all the string players want better, older instruments--except a lucky few like Gerhard Bosse, who has his magnificent Guarnerius (1694). Still, basically, everything seems to be as it has to be. There are no complaints.

How can it be so perfect? "Tell me," asks a musician out of the blue, "do you like Leipzig?" An awkward question, the visitor confesses. The Gewandhaus is a splendid place. The people there are so welcoming, so engaged with what they do. But outside ... So little to look at. Such sullen faces. The air ... "Yes, yes," the musician replies. "That's right. It's dirty and the air is bad.

"You asked what I wished for. I will tell you. On tours, I have been to so many wonderful places. I wish I could share that experience with my wife.

"Traveling is hard, you see. Inevitably it broadens your outlook. It's difficult if your wife, your friends, your sons and daughters never get to go away. People walk around here with a furrowed brow all the time, with a hostile, dead look in their eyes. When I come back from abroad, I really see that again. I suppose eventually it happens to me, too."

No, the visitor reflects. In this building, I have not seen that look on a single face. Now everything makes sense. What, I wonder, would Karl Marx have thought? All around lies a gray sea of foreclosed options, of guaranteed employment and no hope of excellence. The Gewandhaus is an island. Initiative counts here, and commitment, and pride in one's craft. Tradition. For a while or for a lifetime, music is the great escape.