Nikolaus Harnoncourt in conversation with Anna Mika

Herr Harnoncourt, your interpretations of Beethoven's music have met with tremendous acclaim in recent years. Until then you'd apparently been exclusively concerned with Baroque music and with Haydn and Mozart. Was Beethoven a natural progression? As a conductor, how did you come to Beethoven?
I'm often asked that question. Many people seem to think that, as a musician, I began at square one and worked my way progressively forward to the 19th century and finally to the end of the l9th century, but the truth of the matter is that things were rather different. My musical roots lie in the late l9th and early 20th century. We used to play chamber music at home, and the earliest pieces that we ever played were in fact by Beethoven. Mozart was regarded as ancient. During the thirties my father also used to play Gershwin at the piano, in other words, at a time when Gershwin's music was still very new. When I was eighteen, I thought I'd specialise in Dvořák or Strauss.
If we went hack to pre-Classical music with the Concentus musicus and even hefore then, it was above all because we felt that this music was played in such a tedious way. We looked for parallels with other 16th-, l7th- and 18th-century arts, especially with painting, sculpture and architecture, which were so full of life at that time. The Concentus musicus was founded in 1953. Our very first two concerts in 1957 were conceived as a pair, one with music from the court of the Emperor Maximilian (in other words, from around l500) and the other with music by Haydn. So you see that the Classical period was represented from the outset. But quite apart from my work with the Concentus musicus, I've never lost interest in composers like Schubert who influenced me as a child. So I simply can’t say at what point I began to take an interest in such and such a composer. Works that interest me - Porgy and Bess, The Rake's Progress and Wozzeck, for example - are constimtly on my desk. My preoccupation with Classical and pre-Classical works doesn’t cut me off from all that came later in music. I can't make music as though I were living in some 17th- or 18th-century vacuum. Every piece of music is relocated in the present: it has to be meaningful to the people who are alive today.

It's a concert performance of Fidelio that you're conducting in Graz, isn't it?
Fidelio is the one opera I can most easily conduct in the concert hall, since it contains so much that's reminiscent of an oratorio. Fidelio is sui generis as an opera, without precursors or successors. You can’t say that it's a German Singspiel in the tradition of Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Die Zauberflöte. It simply doesn't fit into that sequence. The demands that Beethoven made of any text were very strict, but I don’t think they were the sort of criteria that we ourselves would apply to opera libretti. He wanted to write other operas. but he was so sensitive on the matter of the words that I’m inclined to think that he would have reinvented opera from his own perspective rather than conforming to the prevailing trend.

So there's no sequel?
No. Or, if there is, possibly in Weber. You can detect a powerful influence in Der Freischütz and Euryanthe. There's something very forward-looking, I feel, about these works.

Beethoven has often been reproached for making the scene in Rocco's house in Act One too Singspiel-like in character.
There are two errors bound up with that remark, First, it belittles the German Singspiel. Die Entführungs aus dem Serail is a very serious piece, but it's still a Singspiel, and was even described as an operettaby Mozart. Second, the atmosphere in Rocco’s house in Fidelio is shown to be profoundly oppressive from a musical point of view: the relationships, conditions and characters that are portrayed and hinted at are all extremely complex. And then there is this sense of tension: what would happen if the plot were to hang fire? Leonora would have to many Marcellina that very day, there's absolutely no escape for her.
The numbers that are dismissed as being Singspiel-like in character are actually quite diffcrcnt. On a superficial level, Beethoven adopts the tone of a Singspiel, but only in order to undercut it by novel musical means. When Marcellina sings the words “Fidelio hah ich gewählet", it suddenly sounds as if it is Leonora who is singing, and we are left staring into an abyss. And the conflict between Marcellina and Jaquino is more than simply an amusing little tiff over an ironing-board; that it is a bitter conflict is clear from the music. Beethoven's Fidelio is very often misunderstood, as you can tell from the occasions on which it is given: it tends to be performed at times of political change - here in Graz, for example, it was staged in 1933 as a pro-National Socialist demonstration, in 1945 as an anti-National Socialist gesture to mark the country's liberation from Nazi rule, in 1956 to celebrate post-war reconstruction, and so on and so forth. Oppression, imprisonment and liberation are then emphaised. But for Beethoven these were only a means to an end. What he was concerned about is love. The real action is between Leonora and Florestan. Essentially, the work is about what can be achieved by true love and the fact that a loving wife is ready to do anything for her husband.
Dramatically speaking, the tnost interesting character is without doubt Rocco. He is the only character who is fully drawn from a psychological point of view. All the other characters have only the characteristics necessary for them to play their parts within the overall drama. In Rocco's case we have before us a man whose reasons for acting in such and such a way are readily understandable. We can recognise the conflicts and the way in which he shuts his eyes in the face of his own complicity. Here is a character with whom all who have lived through the last sixty years and not been completely blind to all that was going on are bound to sympathise. But he has another side to him, a side that comes out in his Gold Aria. It`s not as an operatic bass that he speaks of gold. Beethoven uses sophisticated rhetorical figures in the orchestra and striking metres to show that Rocco is obsessed with gold to the point of madness and that he cracks up completely the moment he gets his hands on gold. Perhaps he gambles. There’s something quite uncanny about the way this is portrayed in his aria - the way it turns into a genuine and macabre waltz-like dance or the way Rocco repeats words and, at the same time, becomes quieter and quieter until his whole body starts to twitch once again at the words “Das Glück dient wie ein Knecht für Sold" (For fortune serves its master like a valet). I regard this aria as a mirror held up to the listener with almost brutal force, and I`m firmly convinced that it is related to the German Singspiel on only the most superficial level, inasmuch as it takes over its form, so that the listener is consciously misled. Even the overture, which is frequently dismissed as a lightweight Singspiel overture, is a very serious piece, a worthy introduction to the work as a whole.

In the case of the other characters, one might think that it was clear which are on the side of good and which on the side of evil.
I don’t see it in that way. For example, we dont know on which side the prisoners are. When I read the text and score, I have the distinct impression that Florestan, the minister and Pizarro have known each other for a very long time and that they weren't always enemies. Indeed, one might even suppose that they’re former friends, almost cronies, perhaps from their days in the army or as students. They`re depicted as though they have a common past, so that each of them naturally knows everything about the others. Perhaps politics came between them, perhaps a crime. At all events, the moral dimension of the characters is not clear, except at the moment when Florestan says in his aria that he was not prepared to hush something up - hut what?
What matters as far as the plot is concerned is that Florestan is in a hopeless situation, that he trusts in his wife and that Leonora is ready to do anything for him, even what appears impossible. This opera is a great paean to marital love. All the other elements in the plot simply serve to underline that point. It runs counter to Beethoven's ideas to try to turn it into an opera about oppression arrd liberation.

And the final scene? Does it have this ideal and transfiguring quality for you, too?
Oh yes! lt’s clearly related to the final movement of the Ninth Symphony and to passages from the Missa solemnis.

It's traditional interpolate the Leonore no. 3 overture between the Dungeon Scene and the final tableau. But not in your performances.

Beethoven wanted the duet "O namenlose Freude"" to lead straight into the final scene. He said that there should be no more than seven seconds between these two pieces. I think that's asking a bit much of the designer and director. Generally it`s thought that the time needed to rebuild the set can be filled with the glorious music of the Leonore no. 3 overture. But that's a very bad idea and one, moreover, that seriously disturbs the tempo relationships of the work. All three versions are in agreement on this point: the duet and the march, “Heil sei dem Tag", have exactly the sarne tempo marking, which means that the duet should be taken more slowly and the march more quickly than usual. Dramaturgically speaking, this makes a great deal of sense: the jubilation of the lovers is still coloured by the suffering they`ve been through, it's not just ecstatic but also inward, whereas the jubilation of the finale is like an explosion liberating all the characters' pent-up feelings. You can’t say that Beethoven simply made a mistake and that the duet should be taken more quickly. (Of course, you can always find excuses if you want to take the two pieces at different speeds.) This clash between the two scenes was very important to Beethoven and has nothing to do with the world of superficial reality.

If the final scene is a vision - an oneiric vision -, then it bas a counterpoint in the quartet in Act One.
Yes, the words of this quartet have nothing to do with the music. Each of the four characters is given different words to speak and is in a totally different relationship to the action, and to the same music. I think the word that best defines this music is “wonderful”. Nowadays we say something is wonderful when it is very beautiful; but essentially the word means everything that makes us feel wonderment, everything that rs incomprehensible. I think that even in the introduction on the lower strings every listener must feel that sornething incomprehensible is happening here. The characters are transformed.
We must never lose sight of the fact that linguistic usage has changed since Beethoven's day The word wunderbar is a good exarnple of this. Much the same is true of the words in the Dungeon Duet when Rocco says: "Nur hurtrg fort, nur frisch gegraben" (Now quickly, get to work and dig). Nowadays the words frisch and hurtig suggest joviality and ease. You need only follow the linguistic usage of the time for everything to make sense.

We've come to expect very dramatic voices in this opera. But we know that the first two Leonores, Anna Milder and Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, were still very young. How do you yourself see this problem?
Beethoven also had very young female singers for the Ninth Symphony and Missa solemnis. The boundaries between the dilferent types of voice were far less clear-cut than they are today; so that a soprano could just as easily sing Leonora as Konstanze. The great singers learned their repertory at a very much earlier age, achieving an ideal that they then maintained for an long as they could. They didn't try to develop in the way that today's singers do between the ages of 20 and 40, when their voices become increasingly large, increasingly heavy and increasingly inflexible. And they certainly didn't sing as loudly as they do now. On the whole, vocal technique seems to have been very good: the vocal manuals ofthe time are incredibly demanding, and many singers sang the same roles over a period of many years. I’m sure that works like the Ninth Symphony and Missa solemnis and arias such as those of Leonora and Florestan were not sung and played as tremendously loudly as they are today.

In all, there are three different versions of Fidelio. Have you ever thought of performing one of the earlier versions?
I've thought about it a lot. But at present it would be of only historical interest for me to perfonn any other version than the last - perhaps in order to show how Beethoven arrived at the final result. Such a pedagogical approach to practical music-making is foreign to my nature. That’s something I prefer to do at my desk. I find many things in the first and second versions that are extremely interesting and, as a first attempt, magnificent, just as one’s first idea is often the best. One senses that the Fidelio that is familiar to us is not the product of a single period and that Beethoven developed stylistically. I also believe that he himself did not want all these changes. In the course of a famous session, all his friends and all those who thongt they had something to say on the subject persuaded him to alter, cut and omit things. In several numbers odd bars or groups of bars were cut. Of course, the numbers that were newly written in the wake of this revision are absolutely wonderful.
I don’t think Beethoven regarded the first version as entirely successful, otherwise he wouldn't have agreed to other peoples suggestions for changes. On the other hand, we know that not all the changes reflect his own intentions and that he agreed to them only reluctantly in order to salvage the work. In other words, the version that Beethoven really wanted simply doesn’t exist. Someone with a hotline to Beethoven - or with a great deal of sensitivity - should try to work out what Beethoven himself wanted and what was forced upon him. We'd then have an optimal Fidelio based on the three existing versions. I once considered doing it, but the challenge was too great.

Herr Harnoncourt, perhaps you'll allow me to end by asking a general question. To date you've written three books, and in all of them you express a pronounced sense of cultural pessimism. But in rehearsal you reveal the greatest possible enthusiasm for making music. How do you reconcile these two aspects?
I’m really very pessimistic. On the other hand, I think that it`s impossible to say whether there may yet be ways that we don`t know. If you do something, it must be with the last ounce of commitment and with total enthusiasm, and enthusiasm isn't lessened by pessimism.