Nikolaus Harnoncourt in conversation with Monika Mertl - On Dvořák and the nature of Czech music

Monika Mertl: The present recording marks the beginning of a period of intense involvement with Czech music for you. It is a new departure for you as a conductor, though it also finds you returning to something already familiar to you.
Nikolaus Harnoncourt: For me, the music of Bohemia and Czechoslovakia is quite simply Austrian music, and I feel a great familiarity with it, perhaps also through my family, which has Czech roots. You could also say that it's a return, since I played a lot of this music during my time as a cellist with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra - and played it, moreoveh with immense enjoyment.

The Dvořák Cello Concerto was one of your showpieces during your youth.
Yes, I played it for Karajan when I auditioned for a place in the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

You've approached Dvořák via Schumann and Mendelssohn.
Yes, in that respect I've followed Dvořák's own development. His early works were strongly influenced by Mendelssohn and Schumann. The composer whom we really think of as Dvořák emerged only with his Sixth Symphony. It`s interesting that for a long time the early symphonies weren't numbered at all. The first five were ignored. There's no doubt that this is also due to the fact that Dvořák himself felt that it was only later that he discovered his true voice as a composer.

He suffered from too many ideas and first had to impose some sense of order an them, you mean?
There's no other composer of his generation who was so full of ideas. His contemporaries envied him immensely. But after a while he learnt to control this flood of inspiration - to overwhelming effect. He himself says in the context of this symphony: "In creative brains there is an impulse to write that is very hard to curb."

He substantially cut the second movement following the first performance in London in l885.
Yes, forty bars were cut. He wrote to his publisher, Fritz Simrock: "The Adagio is now much shorter and more compact, and I'm now certain that there's not a single note too many." It's all bound up with this exuberance of invention. A second stage in the operation was necessary to find the right sense of balance.

How important is the national aspect of this music?
It's something that moves me deeply. During my time as an orchestral musician, a very large percentage of the players were either Czech themselves or had Czech ancestors. Half the orchestra would burst into tears whenever we played a symphony by Dvořák. I myself feel something of this emotion - I won't call it sentimentality. This music gets under my skin. There's no doubt that it’s the Slav element, the sense of valediction, this vast tear. This element is highlighted in a way you don't find anywhere else in Central European music. At the start of the Scherzo I always go weak at the knees. You're aware of the sense of national identity in this music. Dvořák felt that it was important for this wealth of musical talent to play a role in art music, too. For nearly 200 years, almost all the horn players in Europe were Czech! Wonderful music was written, and with Smetana and, above all, Dvořák it was suddenly music of international stature, not just a local affair.

This was the period of Czech nationalism. Dvořák had played the viola in the Provisional Theatre Orchestra in Prague for almost ten years.
He must have been a very good viola player. It’s said that his solo in Aennchen's aria in Der Freischütz ["Einst träumte meiner sel'gen Base"] was a high point in performances of the opera. He comes from inside, so to speak, from inside the orchestra. You can tell from the viola part and from the way in which he doesn't use the instrument for long periods but then brings it in again at a very specific and generally very important point.

But what is important in Dvořák's music is that it isn't folk music, although folk music was the starting point for his inspiration.
He didn't need to use folk music. Even his Slavonic Dances are his own invention. He copied the rhythms of folk music, but not the music itself.

You're starting with the Seventh, which is not all that popular. In other words, there's no problem with the performing tradition of this piece.
I've far more memories of the Eighth and the Ninth, whereas I played the Seventh only rarely. I have the feeling that I'm able to go straight to the heart of this music and don’t have to sidestep a whole pile of traditions that are inauthentic precisely because they're of recent date.

Why do you think the Seventh Symphony is so rarely played?
There are symphonies that conductors avoid because they need lots of rehearsals and a good deal of preparatory work before you can understand them and make sense of them. Beethoven's Fourth is one such piece, as is Schubert’s Fourth. It`s thought that they're less likely to be successful in performance - not that I believe such remarks for a moment.

The Seventh is in fact seen as Dvořák's symphonic masterpiece.
Yes, but only now. Eduard Hanslick thought that there was too much trombone writing in it and told Simrock: "The Scherzo would be delightful, but in the other movements the trombones devour too many of the contours." He was particularly critical of the instrumentation, a criticism that annoyed Dvořák. Later that same month Dvořák wrote to Simrock to say that he had received an invitation to conduct the D minor Symphony in Frankfurt: “If I see you there, I should like to show you that the contours are unmistakable, even with the trombones. It depends entirely on how you do it." Dvořák was convinced that he had written it correctly - and I may add that I feel the same.
Also, this was the very time that Bruckner was having problems with the various orchestral registers. With Brucknen however, the orchestral sound is built up much more on the trombones, whereas in Dvořák's case the trombones are used in particular passages only to reinforce the sound, they never form the actual basis of the instrumentation. If they're played too loudly, the piece at once becomes overblown and loses its lightly-sprung character

Brahms and Hanslick were forever criticising Dvořák.
Brahms was very circumspect in his criticisms, since he also envied Dvořák. And Dvořák was so much in awe of Brahms that he asked him to read the proofs of his scores. It's a very interesting relationship. They were so different in their basic attitude to art, yet were able to respect each other’s results. And there was nothing really to criticise. In this way it was possible for them to be friends, a friendship sustained by great admiration; it is rare for two such great composers of the same generation to be on such good terms with one another. It’s as though Handel and Bach had been friends.

To a certain extent they were complementary figures.
With Dvořák, you’re much more directly involved in the action, what he has to say is very spontaneous. With Brahms, it is the artistry that predominates, you have the feeling that you’re not looking at it directly but through some kind of optical instrument. I certainly don`t want to sound dismissive, it’s just that one is conscious of the art that has gone into it.

The most familiar part of the Seventh Symphony is its Scherzo, which sounds rather different in your own interpretation.
What is important are the phrase markings that obscure the rhythm at the beginning. Only later is this rhythm strongly accented. Initially, the listener doesn't know whether this jig-like dance is the Scherzo or whether it is what the cellos and bassoon are playing in unison. It’s really only a variation of the other theme, but it sounds like the melody. Both are heard together. And the rhythm here is very soft-contoured - that`s definitely how the composer wants it. It’s merely hinted at. I find it incredibly moving, because it makes the movement appear positively to blossom. If you interpret it simply as a way of bowing, rather than as an articulation marking, the result is something quite different.

Dvořák is one of those composers who was held in the highest regard even during his lifetime, an esteem that finds expression not least in the fact that Jonáček and Mahler were the first conductors to perform The Wild Dove, for example.
Janáček felt that Dvořák's symphonic poems were worth analysing, an analysis that I've examined in detail myself. Dvořák, too, left notes on these pieces. Then there are the poems by Karel Erben - and then there's the music.
It`s clear that Dvořák didn’t think it important to let his listeners know exactly what is happening in the piece and where. On the other hand, he was very keen for them to know the contents. Generally he made sure that audiences were given a summary of those contents. It`s not possible to say, however, exactly how the poem is turned into music. Sometimes the metrical patterns of a particular strophe fit precisely beneath the corresponding notes, but then again there are passages that Dvořák himself ascribes to quite different sections of the work, and Janáček's analyses, in turn, propose completely different interpretations. There are strophes that Dvořák is said to have omitted, but I can see very clearly that he has done no such thing.
I think that this touches on a basic principle of programme music. It was incredibly important for Dvořák that these symphonic poems should have a musical logic of their own, quite independent of their programme, and that they should be great music. That is the decisive point. Works in which the music merely illustrates a programme with greater or lesser brilliancy I would describe as programme music in the pejorative sense of the term.

In this context it's impossible not to think of Richard Strauss. Also sprach Zarathustra was written in the same year as The Wild Dove - 1896.
And he'd already written some very big works like Don Juan, Tod und Verklärung and Till Eulenspiegel. In my own view, the mother of all symphonic poems is Mendelssohn's Die schöne Melusine, which in turn is descended from Haydn’s symphonies and Beethoven's piano sonatas and symphonies. No one ever doubted that a Haydn symphony was derived from some extra-musical statement: in Haydn's day this was regarded as completely self-evident. The only question was whether one should tell the audience or whether it was enough that it was there. The musical character of such a story soon becomes clear: You can often hear that a work based on contrast and reaction loses its expressive force and meaning when reduced to the level of a series of paratactical ideas.

Dvořák intended ta write these ballads much sooner and clearly planned a longer series.
There's no doubt that these poems meant a lot to him. At a time when something like a sense of patriotism was emerging, the world of legends associated with a particular nation inevitably became especially important. Erben wrote poems based on the old Czech folk tales and legends, all of them gruesome stories, like all the worlds fairy tales. They deal with questions of guilt and fate and with ways of dealing with guilt and fate, morally and legally.

The piece is extremely complex, monothematic, with everything derived from the opening funeral march, and at the end we hear a variation on the opening march theme.
It's a reminiscence of the motif of grief and Iamentaticn from the beginning: first it's the death of the husband, then the death of the widow herself. The guilt theme keeps on returning, too. The themes associated with grief and guilt are derived from each other and are so intricately interwoven that it’s difficult to say where grief ends and pain begins. This use of derivation technique produces such a unity that there's no real need for any textual support: everyone can hear where the dove is involved. The wild dove is the voice of the conscience of this widow, who killed her husband. It's like tinnitus ringing in your ear, something you can't bear but from which you can't escape.

Dvořák's ending is different from that of the poem.
In strophes 25 and 26, it effectively says "No grave, only heavy stones. The curse on her name weighs even more heavily." Janáček writes: "Beneath the weight of the chords, which almost stifle one another, we virtually feel the burden that presses down on the wretched woman's body like an enormous stone." The harmonies are genuinely terrifying, but then the music modulates quite unconcernedly from F minor to C major. Dvořák redeems the widow by musical means.