1 CD - 3984-24487-2 - (p) 1999

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)






Symphony No. 8 in C major, Op. 88
36' 32"
- Allegro con brio
10' 47"
1
- Adagio 10' 02"
2
- Allegretto grazioso 6' 09"
3
- Allegro ma non troppo
9' 31"
4
The Noon Witch "Polednice", Op. 108
14' 09"
- Allegretto 5' 44"
5
- Andante sostenuto e molto tranquillo, 3' 39"
6
- Allegro 2' 08"
7
- Andante 2' 39"
8




 
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Nikolaus Harnoncourt
 
Luogo e data di registrazione
Het Concertgebouw, Amsterdam (Olanda) - dicembre 1998
Registrazione live / studio
live
Producer / Engineer
Wolfgang Mohr / Martina Gottschau / Friedemann Engelbrecht / Michael Brammann / Tobias Lehmann
Prima Edizione CD
Teldec Classics - 3984-24487-2 - (1 cd) - 50' 46" - (p) 1999 - DDD
Prima Edizione LP
-

"To rethink the works completely afresh"
Nikolaus Harnoncourt in conversation with Klaus Döge on Dvořák as a symphonist and symphonic poet

Klaus Döge: Dvořák is the third 19th-century composer after Brahms and Bruckner whose works you're now recording on an appreciable scale. What draes tou to this composer? And what is his attraction for you as an interpreter?
Nikolaus Harnoncourt: I got to know Dvořák’s music from an early age. My father played the piano and we used to perform Dvořák’s piano trios at home. During my seventeen years as an orchestral cellist, from 1952 to 1969, I often played the three great symphonies - the Seventh not so often, the Eighth very often and the "New World" Symphony several times a yeah. I was always very moved by this music. But it annoyed me that it was routinely dismissed as the work of a lightweight composer. You really can’t reproach a composer for drawing on such a profusion of ideas! I think that Dvořák’s music has an immense depth to it; it has a beauty, melancholy, yearning, a typically Slav valedictory mood and a sadness that are characteristic of all Czech music. It’s not sentimentality, but very profound expression; and it`s music that can easily come to grief. You have only to allow the brass to play a little too loudly and the whole musical texture is reduced to a great harmonic mush, albeit one that sounds quite splendid. But the music contains a large number of elaborate details, and I really can’t understand musicians who treat Dvořák like some hack composer who, they concede, writes fantastic works of great musicality but whom they still regard as just a little inferior to the great composers of his day.

This view of Dvořák has implications for the way in which his works are routinely interpreted... 
Yes, and the works that are most often enlisted here are the Slavonic Dances. But these pieces are difficult to play well, and I'm not prepared to perform them in the concert hall unless I have enough rehearsals.With Dvořák you pay a high price for any untidiness and lack of precision. My working method involves rethinking works like the Eighth Symphony and asking whether the dots over the notes merely indicate that the notes in question are not legato and, if not, whether they should be long or short, and what type of articulation Dvořák had in mind with this range of staccato markings, from hammered marcato to barely separated staccato cantabile. As for the tonal balance, here too there is a lot that needs careful consideration when you've got three trombones and a tuba, together with four horns and two trumpets, pitted against a woodwind department with a completely different dynamic range and when you see how meticulously Dvořák differentiates the dynamics: he doesn't write a fortissimo for the full orchestra, but always takes account of its weakest member, so you can always tell that it is the flute that has to play fortissimo, while the other instruments all have to play in such a way that the flute can be heard and understood. I have to say in this context that it is very stimulating when one has enough rehearsal time and can really rethink these works completely afresh, bar by bar.

Anyone listening to the Eighth Symphony will find many sudden insights, notably in the case of the flute interjections in the second movement. They sound more forced than usual.
The flutes don’t take up the musical argument and carry it forward but are a reaction to it. This is clear from the fact that Dvořák later entrusts these outbursts to  the strings, where they become real fortissimo screams, interrupting the melodic line. It`s as though the imaginative world of the act of composition, with its cut and thrust of argument and counterargument, comes alive here over and above the notes themselves. I find this very pronounced here.

Although the Eighth is Dvořák's second most popular symphony it is also, in a sense, his most controversial...
On account of its form.The doyen ofViennese music critics, Eduard Hanslick, said that it was fragmentary and rhapsodical, while Brahms expressed the view that it contained only irrelevancies, but nothing of substance. It is possible to see these remarks against the background of their age, and I`ve long been preoccupied by this question. Dvořák was undoubtedly familiar with the norms of sonata form, and in his early symphonies he took up and developed a Schumannesque variant of this form.That he now trumps it with sovereign mastery, playing with it as a composer, using it in a way quite different from Brahms and genuinely refashioning it means that, for me, he succeeds in creating a convincing original structure. Players have to be made aware of this, otherwise all you get is a kind of notesplnning that may be very beautiful but which obscures the novelty of the work. I felt this most powerfully in the case of the final movement, where, towards the end, a great lyrical block arises as a variant of the cello theme. Under this heading, too, come the accelerandos in the codas of the first and last movements, the second of which brings the work to an end almost in the manner of a waterfall.

The Eighth Symphony dates from 1889, when Dvořák no longer saw himself as an absolute musician but, increasingly, as a tone poet. The work must surely have been affected by this development.
I’m convinced of it. The themes are so eloquent. Even the introductory theme is highly expressive as a result of its suspensions, its gestural language and its instrumentation. But the question remains: did Dvořák intend to convey to his listeners a particular concrete meaning, or was it not important to him how listeners interpreted it? If the player performs in what I might call an eloquent manner and recognises the work's marked rhetorical component, he will play it differently, and the audience will hear a much more expressive piece. I have always been interested in the language of music and asked myself what are the rhetorical figures in Bach's music and the linguistic gestures in Mozart’s. And then suddenly I read that Beethoven says that a musician who does not understand rhetoric cannot compose. As a conductor I want to have all the information I can about the work I am conducting, information both intrinsic and extrinsic to the piece,and I also want the players to share this information, because the interpretation will be more convincing as a result. But I do not think that Dvořák wanted to convey any concrete information to the audience of the Eighth Symphony. He was concerned, rather, with universal expressive images and chains of association that each individual listener can experience for him- or herself.

By contrast, the music of Dvořák’s symphonic poem The Noon Witch demands to be interpreted in concrete terms... 
When Mendelssohn writes a concert overture about the tale of the fair Melusine, he knows perfectly well that there will not be a single person in the audience who is not familiar with this story. And when Dvořák writes The Noon Witch - first and foremost for his Czech compatriots - he knows that everyone will be familiar with Karel Jaromír Erben’s ballad and that even those listeners who do not know Erben’s poem in detail will at least be familiar with the underlying story, just as we are familiar with the story of Hansel and Gretel. And if a composer writes a symphonic poem called The Noon Witch, we know very well that it will be about a mother who threatens her screaming child with the noon witch, until the witch herself arrives and takes the child away. Basically, it is a musical exploration of the theme of guilt and the way we come to terms with such guilt.

Haw does Dvořák translate his programmatical source into music? ls the word-painting doggedly literal, as music critics have often complained?
Sometimes he takes a line from the poem - especially if it is exceptionally striking - and uses it to create a clear rhythm, an eloquent atmosphere. I mean, it`s simply impossible for word-painting to be as doggedly literal as it is with Richard Strauss, for example. Dvořák never did anything like that. He musicalises and dramatises the text: the witch`s motif, for instance, first appears at the start of the idyll, while the child is playing games; in a way, this turns the idyll on its head.Then the witch arrives with the recitative-like motif, “Give me the child". And then comes the dance. Everyone can hear that this is a dance, everyone knows the expression "witch’s dance”. And you can hear the hobbling, hopping witch with her broomstick in the woodwinds’ sharply dotted rhythm, which is heard in counterpoint to a variant of the motif associated with the children's screams, suggesting less of a triumph than a desire to evoke a sense of terror by purely musical means. This eerie dance increases our fear that something terrible is happening. I can well understand what Leoš Janáček meant when he wrote that whenever he heard this chromatic contrary motion he could literally see the witch`s bony hand reaching out to grab the child. Musically speaking, I lind this incredibly vivid, immediately intelligible and really very very powerful.

Translation: Stewart Spencer

Nikolaus Harnoncourt (1929-2016)
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