Sword of the Spirit: Stanisław Skrowaczewski and the music of Anton Bruckner

“SKROWACZEWSKI: Behind the public baton lives a very private man”–the headline, which appeared in the Minneapolis Star on October 18, 1974—glibly, if succinctly encapsulated the contradictions that defined and animated its subject. 

Stanisław Skrowaczewski was born in 1923; around the same time as Bruno Maderna, Robert Craft, Pierre Boulez, and Michael Gielen. Like them, Skrowaczewski was a child of a time when the long 19th century was giving way to a still undetermined and often chaotic 20th. As a result, his art not only embodied the preoccupations of postwar modernism, but also in surprising ways revealed its vulnerabilities, namely the prewar past it sought to transcend.

Skrowaczewski came of age in a time of war, which he experienced first-hand. When Poland was jointly invaded by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939, he was a piano student and aspiring composer just a month shy of turning 16. Called to serve, he watched one of his closest friends die from a shrapnel blast. He was discharged from the front lines, but destruction continued to follow him. Many years later, he bemusedly remarked of his new (and final) home in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park: “Between 1939 and 1945, my family had three homes destroyed by war. The fourth time you really can’t care so much.” During a German air raid, Skrowaczewski’s hands were crushed by a collapsing wall, a fate he accepted with characteristic pragmaticism, telling one reporter that “even before it happened, I had begun to have doubts that I wanted a piano career.” Instead, he embarked on a dual career as composer and conductor. For a moment, he emerged as one of the leading figures of the Polish avant-garde alongside Witold Lutosławski, Krzysztof Penderecki, and the tragically short-lived Tadeusz Baird. But it was Skrowaczewski’s talent on the podium that garnered him the most lasting admiration, securing for both him and his young wife Krystyna a life outside the Eastern Bloc.

In his prime Skrowaczewski was the very image of the Atomic Age triumphant. The sight of his lean figure, neatly-trimmed hair, and large glasses, would not have looked out of place on the campuses of MIT or CalTech. When he assumed the post of music director of the Minnesota Orchestra in 1960 (then the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra), his self-discipline and discreet public persona were marked contrasts from his more glamorous predecessors, qualities which at the time were frequently attacked by local critics and even members of his own orchestra.

Skrowaczewski was the diametric opposite of his greatest forerunner in the Twin Cities, the exuberant Dimitri Mitropoulos, whose American career was nearly at its end when the Pole was beginning his. Yet they both shared a heartfelt commitment to the music of their time, a healthy contempt for mammon, and a lifelong adoration for the colossal symphonies of Austrian Late Romanticism—Mahler in the case of Mitropoulos, Bruckner for Skrowaczewski. The latter symphonist is even explicitly recalled in the title of his Concerto for Orchestra’s finale: “Anton Bruckner’s Heavenly Journey.” Within conversation, he often referred to the composer as “my beloved Bruckner.”

It is tempting to think that this interest in Bruckner was a symptom of aesthetic senescence, as occurs with some conductors. In fact, it was an abiding passion that had been ignited in his youth. He was fond of recalling that so intense was his physical reaction to hearing the Seventh Symphony for the first time that it induced a fainting spell, leaving him with a fever that committed him to bed for days. 

But it was the Eighth Symphony which became for him both a calling card and parting embrace. It was the sole work on his last concert as music director in Minneapolis in 1979 and was programmed again among his final performances there before his death in 2017.

Bruckner’s devotion to Catholicism, which manifests itself powerfully in his music, must surely have appealed to Skrowaczewski, who himself came from a country that was a bulwark of the Church against the domination of Soviet atheism. “When I conduct the Eighth Symphony,” he told an Austrian reporter late in life, “it seems to me that it is already over in an instant. […] It is like a religious meditation […] you lose the sense of time.” Meditation this performance of the Eighth may be, but there is nothing in it of genteel, saccharine religiosity (to say nothing of the virginal puerility that revulsed Arturo Toscanini). It is, instead, powerful, manly, and granitic. An April 2012 retrospective in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, observed a trace of “melancholy” in this formerly avid skier and mountaineer, activities which by then could only be pursued within his memories. On the podium, however, his vigor and virility remained undiminished. Here he heroically surmounted Bruckner’s daunting symphonic summits. No gesture or effort feels wasted. From beginning to end, conductor and orchestra are unified in this potent reading; full of grandeur alit at nodal points with a touch of urgency, and ecstatically songful in its lyrical moments. The climaxes—apocalyptic in the first movement, resplendent in the finale—are like the aural incarnation of Ephesians 6:17 (“And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God”). Here, for once, the angelical likeness of Bruckner’s music is that of an avenging angel.

Minnesota Orchestra violist Michael Adams said in a late 1990s article:

“[Skrowaczewski] is not the most down-to-earth guy. The jokes that are made about him are that he’s kind of humor-impaired. But to me what’s incredible about him is that in a very cynical business, he’s very uncorrupted. He’s a very pure musician. He eats, lives, sleeps, and breathes music, and that’s a refreshing quality. It’s all from the heart. It’s like music is a religion to him.”

In a time when orchestras are awash with effortlessly photogenic mediocrities gyrating fecklessly on the podium, the essential honesty and integrity of Skrowaczewski are sorely missed. In this splendid late performance, one is invited to share in his worship of the art which sustained his entire life.

(This essay will be included in the liner notes for a forthcoming Skrowaczewski CD to be issued by the Magistrale label in Japan.)

Otto Klemperer’s “Philadelphia Story” In Great Depression America

A large poster of Otto Klemperer, his bespectacled face clenched with intense emotion, looms over the crowds spilling out after concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, his arms jutting out as if imploring them to turn back. This likeness conveys what Raymond V. Lopez, a musical mentor of my teen years, recalled from his boyhood at Los Angeles’ old Philharmonic Hall: “Klemperer was terrifying—a giant with eyes that burned right through you.”

Although it spanned nearly 70 years, only two periods from Klemperer’s professional career are generally remembered: His brief stint as head of the Kroll Opera in Berlin, then his final years leading the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. Overlooked are the two decades in between when his life revolved, for better and worse, around the United States.

“I don’t like how the dollar always [was priority],” he said in a BBC interview in 1961. “This was not good.” Later he explained to Peter Heyworth that the preeminence of lucre in American cultural considerations chafed him, adding that while he lived in the United States he “felt in the wrong place.” He did not always think so.

“My joy, my pride, my gratitude is still stronger because it was an American university [Klemperer’s emphasis]. . . a college of my new fatherland which gave me this decoration,” he said as he accepted an honorary doctorate from Occidental College in September 1936. “You can imagine what a deep gratitude [people] like myself feel to the United States, to this great and generous country. . .” Nevertheless, foretastes of his later disenchantment emerged: “We [musicians]. . .  have to save [music] from the attacks of materialism. . . In a crude world of materialism there is, of course, no room for things making no money.” 

Klemperer’s most important position in the United States would be his six-year leadership of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Taking the reins at the height of the Great Depression in 1933, the conductor grappled with an organization that was ailing financially. Its founder William A. Clark, Jr., heir to a mining fortune, withdrew his financial support; a year later he would be dead from a heart attack. Artur Rodziński, its rising star music director, had abruptly declared that uncertainty over the orchestra’s future forced him to seek stable work with the Cleveland Orchestra.

Into this fray stepped Klemperer, whose first concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic was described by Bertha McCord Knisely of local weekly Saturday Night as “nothing short of astounding.” Despite this success, Klemperer had no intention of staying in Southern California. He complained to family and friends about a city which seemed to him more “an enormous village. . . an intellectual desert such as we do not know in our Europe.” His real ambitions were set on the great orchestras of the East. In 1935 Leopold Stokowski announced his resignation from the Philadelphia Orchestra. By that December, Klemperer embarked on a guest engagement to lead a series of concerts with Stoki’s band in the hopes of succeeding him. 

Initially he disliked the glossy, immaculately manicured sound that the orchestra had cultivated under its music director, though he eventually came to appreciate their virtuosic responsiveness. (Near the end of his life, Klemperer expressed great admiration for his colleague: “The Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski was really a giant.”) 

Edna Phillips, the orchestra’s harpist, remembered well the conductor’s “strange temperament.” She described a New Year’s Day rehearsal for one of his Beethoven concerts as a “war of wills” between recalcitrant orchestra and “imperious maestro,” with oboist Marcel Tabuteau becoming especially flustered.

“Klemperer. . . bent over to speak to the illustrious oboist. . . Tabuteau’s face turned bright red. Afterward, [principal flautist William] Kincaid [said] that throughout the first half of rehearsal Tabuteau had been making derogatory comments in French; and since Klemperer didn’t use a podium, he was close enough to hear him. Worse still, Klemperer had spoken to Tabuteau in French, letting him know that everything he said had been overheard and understood.”

Programs of Beethoven, Mahler, and Bruckner were met with acclaim by the public, if a touch of skepticism from critics. Nevertheless, polls favored him to succeed Stokowski; even his relations with the musicians had become remarkably cordial. It would come to naught—Stokowski ultimately rescinded his resignation. In 1936 he once again announced his abdication. This time it was permanent and there was more: Eugene Ormandy, then with the Minneapolis Symphony, was appointed his successor. Klemperer was livid.

“After the decision in Philadelphia, nothing will come unexpected and nothing will astonish me,” he vented to businessman Ira Hirschmann. “The superficial music will be en vogue (was and will be always).”

A quarter of a century would pass until Klemperer would again appear on the podium of Philadelphia’s Academy of Music.

(This essay will be included in the liner notes of a forthcoming Japanese reissue of Klemperer’s Philadelphia Orchestra broadcasts.)

Otto Klemperer in rehearsal at the Hollywood Bowl (circa 1933).

Hans Knappertsbusch, Maverick Maestro

Hans Knappertsbusch has always stood apart from other great German conductors of the 20th century, a dark horse among his more glamorous (and consistent) colleagues. Non-conformist by nature, he preferred to cut his own path, even when doing so risked making matters more difficult for himself. “Kna,” as he is affectionately called by his admirers, was an unrepentant monarchist in the midst of Weimar democracy, an open skeptic of the Nazis during the Third Reich, a stubbornly persistent adherent of the bowdlerized Bruckner of Franz Schalk and Ferdinand Löwe; his surface bearing concealing an inner courtly gentlemanliness. 

In 1975, a decade after the conductor’s death, the German music critic Karl Schumann said of him: “I have never come across an artist who so impressed, so fascinated me as Hans Knappertsbusch.” Had his studio discography been all that was bequeathed to posterity, there would be little there to corroborate this generous assessment. Like others of his time and place, Knappertsbusch trusted the instincts of the moment to guide him through a performance. “Gentlemen, you know the piece, I know the piece—see you tonight,” became something of his signature phrase to orchestras before shrugging off the rehearsals he notoriously disdained. Such a spontaneous approach could potentially ignite fireworks in the concert hall. In the recording studio, however, which requires at least a degree of calculation and planning, his carefree attitude of Bavarian gemütlichkeit often worked against him. His listless Meistersinger on Decca, which would cost him the honor of leading the label’s flagship stereo Ring cycle, immediately comes to mind.

Fortunately for his posthumous legacy, a significant and seemingly ever-growing discography of live performances have survived as a bracing rejoinder to his studio work. With the gritty, sonorous power Knappertsbusch drew from orchestras being particularly well suited to Wagner, it is natural that his work in Bayreuth’s orchestra pit has become his best known. Two officially approved traversals of Parsifal have become milestones for any serious record collecting Wagnerite, but perhaps even more remarkable is his Götterdämmerung from Bayreuth’s postwar inauguration; a rendering of such volcanic impetuosity that it leaves the listener second guessing John Culshaw’s later decision to ditch Knappertsbusch in favor of the young Georg Solti.

He could be no less compelling on the concert podium, even when startlingly fallible. Eyebrows may find themselves twitching at Henri Büsser’s review of a Knappertsbusch engagement in Paris from 1956 wherein his “sobriety and precision”—neither of them qualities typically associated with this conductor—are singled out for praise. Germany, where Virgil Thomson noted conductors had traditionally cultivated a “rough” sound that contrasted markedly with American expectations of ensemble synchronization, had its tastes reshaped after World War II by the ascendance of younger conductors such as Rudolf Kempe and Herbert von Karajan (with Erich Kleiber as spiritual godfather) whose sleek exactitude owed more to Arturo Toscanini than to their own elder compatriots. Borne from an aesthetic outlook steeped in the waning, twilit Romanticism of late Wilhelmine Germany, Knappertsbusch’s postwar recordings—especially his late ones for Westminster—can sound as though the shadow of the 20th century had never darkened his existence, so thoroughly and comparatively remote did his style remain against the rapid changes of the 1950s and 1960s. 

In his overview of the Salzburg Festival during the NSDAP period, Andreas Novak pithily captured the essence of Knapperstbusch’s character when he referred to him as a “gruff humanist.” As tends to occur with strong-willed individualists, their singular vision can clash against the narrow concerns of more mundane folk. As Arthur Vogel, the music section chief of the American occupation government in Bavaria noted, “the same character of independence and pride” which had kept him aloof from the Nazis also made him difficult to work with and “reluctant to give up even a small part of his Teutonic, heavily Wagnerian bias.” Solti, who took the reins of the Bavarian State Opera from Knappertsbusch in 1946, would long chafe with resentment over the “hysterical screams of approval” that greeted his elder colleague whenever he approached the podium. “Coexisting with him was terribly difficult for me,” he recalled nearly half a century later.

A few years before, Knappertsbusch ran afoul of a detractor with far more capacity to derail his career than any young conducting upstart. 

“He with his blond hair and blue eyes was certainly a German, but unfortunately he believed that even with no ear he could with his temperament still produce good music,” Adolf Hitler privately opined. “To attend the [Bavarian State] Opera when he was conducting was a real punishment.” (Despite this and a temporary ban on performance, Knappertsbusch’s name was included among those exempt from compulsory military mobilization in the Gottbegnadeten-Liste.)

Just a little over a decade after the war’s end, Knappertsbusch drifted into his Indian summer, with he and the Munich Philharmonic (whom he maintained a close relationship with in his final decade) each settling into comfortable conservatism. On October 18, 1956 they stood before an audience in Ascona, Switzerland, which sits along the shores of Lake Maggiore, less than 5 miles from the Italian border. Whatever expectations the audience in the Aule delle Scuole may have had for conductor and orchestra on that date were likely confounded by the ruggedly idiosyncratic performances on this disc. 

In his treatise on conducting, Wagner bemoaned the condescension which musicians of his time took towards Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8: “[They] came to regard the entire symphony as a sort of accidental hors d’oeuvre of [the composer’s] muse—who after the exertions of the [Symphony No. 7] had chosen ‘to take things rather easily.’” As befits a noted Bayreuthian, Knappertsbusch’s interpretation carefully heeds the advice Wagner dispenses for conductors tackling the score. Far from being the lightweight “silly symphony” it often is depicted as, he dispatches the humor of the Beethoven Eighth with savage delivery, investing it with a sardonic tone that pointedly heightens the score’s deceptive sophistication. His pacing is deliberate; the cumulative effect massive, weighty, nearly crushing. 

Cut from the same cloth is his expansive reading of Brahms’ Symphony No. 2. Its pastoral opening movement, which emerges as if drawn out in a single breath, stands as one of the most remarkable performances in Knappertsbusch’s discography. Each note, played for its full value, tells. A bewitching illusion of having vanished the music’s pulse is cast over the listener, with the conductor coaxing a stream of Wagnerian unendliche Melodie unfettered by bar lines. Momentary instrumental lapses—and there are a number of them—are conquered by the sheer charisma of Knappertsbusch’s direction. 

Another officer (and musical academic) attached with the postwar Allied occupation of Bavaria, John Evarts, ruefully noted in his diary the “outrageous liberties” that Knappertsbusch took upon his return to the podium after a brief ban imposed by the Military Government. “[His] admirers were wildly enthusiastic about the eye-and-ear-full [sic] which they received.” Judging from the results on display in this recording at least, Kna’s supporters had ample reason for their unrestrained acclaim.

(This essay was commissioned by ATS in Japan for inclusion as liner notes in a forthcoming Knappertsbusch release.)

Uncompromising, occasionally uncouth: Hans Knappertsbusch at the podium (circa late 1950s).

The stoic “gai-tare”: James DePreist’s Bruckner in Japan

The first—and last—time I heard James DePreist conduct in person was in December 2000, an opportunity which occurred by pure chance. Franz Welser-Möst had originally been scheduled to conduct Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on that date, but as had become his habit during this period (at least with his Southern California engagements), he abruptly cancelled. With relatively short notice, James DePreist was called upon to replace him and, additionally, made a surprising switch in the scheduled program: The Mahler Seventh would be swapped out for the Tenth (in the Cooke II version).

DePreist lead a performance which remains imprinted upon my memory for its serenity, at odds with the post-Bernsteinian morbidity then often heard in late Mahler. Far from being the creation of a man living in the shadow of death, DePreist seemed to find the work’s inspiration in the defiance of death proclaimed in Mahler’s Second: “O Tod! Du Allbezwinger! Nun bist du bezwungen!”

Afterwards, I ventured over to the backstage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to have him autograph a CD. Though his movement was impaired by the polio that he contracted while on tour in Thailand in 1962, it only served to enhance the man’s aura of dignity emerging triumphant through adversity; his imposing figure lending him a quality of a hero wearied by the passing of time. He was kind enough to spare a few moments to speak to me, a tongue-tied eighteen-year-old, briefly. When I timidly remarked to him how the life-affirming quality of his interpretation of the Mahler Tenth had impressed me, he smiled, then took a breath. “That’s how it ought to be, young man,” DePreist replied to me. “This is a symphony about death, about love, by a man who still believed he had a lot of life to express it all.”

DePreist carved out a notable career in his homeland, gaining admiration for his longtime tenure as music director of the Oregon Symphony, as well as his teaching at The Juilliard School; and by 2005, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush. Yet his name never soared as high as that of some of his contemporaries in America’s classical music circles. Instead, it was in Europe and especially Japan where he found recognition commensurate with his artistry. It is tempting, but perhaps misleading (to say nothing of futile) to speculate over why this may have been so. He himself seemed unconcerned. “I would never want to be denied the opportunity to conduct because I'm black,” he once stated. “But neither would I want to be engaged because I'm black.”

In Scandinavia he made a number of well-received recordings of varied repertoire for the BIS and Ondine labels. Together with the several recordings he made in Oregon for Delos, DePreist left behind a sizable and distinguished legacy which continues to be admired by music-lovers. Overlooked, however, is his period at the helm of the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra (colloquially known by locals as the “To-kyō,” an abbreviation of the ensemble’s formal Japanese name) in the mid-2000s, a brief moment which could lay fair claim to being the most glamourous in his entire career. Not that he had an easy time of it by any means.

Though he had enjoyed a longstanding relationship with the orchestra as a guest, his engagement as music director came during difficult times for the organization. It had suffered from then Governor of Tokyo Ishihara Shintarō’s program of administrative reforms; which, among other things, sought to consolidate cultural organizations, and shutter others deemed to be redundant or financially untenable. The resulting budget cuts hit the To-kyō hard, leading to shifts in personnel, and according to some music critics, a perceptible drop in its musical standards. Compounding the orchestra’s stress was the recent loss of its music director Gary Bertini, who had died in Israel in March 2005 a few weeks after his last performances in Russia. DePreist himself was not in the best of health. Among other challenges he faced were the after-effects of a kidney transplant, which had freed him from the onerous necessity of dialysis treatment, but forced him to conduct from a wheelchair for the remainder of his life. If he was fazed by any of this, he never let on publicly. On April 20, 2005 when the To-kyō held a press conference at the ANA Intercontinental Hotel announcing DePreist as its next director, he appeared the very image of confidence and security that the organization sorely needed during this delicate time.

Over the next three seasons, DePreist enthusiastically set into his new role: Delivering highly regarded performances of Beethoven and Shostakovich symphonies, shoring up the orchestra’s technical polish, visiting local schools for To-kyō’s community outreach program, and even becoming a sort of highbrow gaitare—a person from abroad whose exotic foreignness is crucial to their celebrity appeal. In that capacity DePreist appeared as an important supporting character in the manga Nodame Cantabile, where his parts were rendered in katakana, heavily emphasizing the evocative exoticism of the other which Japanese audiences often find appealing in their resident gaikokujin. In Japan he accomplished that feat increasingly rare in classical music: Extending one’s renown beyond the boundaries of their art. Unfortunately, despite these successes, his health was becoming an increasing and significant impediment to the continuation of his work, eventually ruling out a prolonged tenure with the To-kyō. So it was with profound mutual regret that he announced his retirement in 2007, effective at the end of the orchestra’s season the following year. The reins would be handed over to Eliahu Inbal, while Koizumi Kazuhiro would step up from Principal Guest Conductor to Resident Conductor.

Echoing the Mahler that I had encountered in my youth under his command, this set of To-kyō broadcasts of DePreist’s Bruckner is marked by an embrace of life readily discernible to the listener. If not the heaven-storming symphonic essays typically heard, the moving vulnerability of these performances have their own virtues. They are long on lyrical flow and textural blend. Conductor and orchestra cajoles, caresses the music, but never forces anything from it. Music pours from these scores with the inevitability, with all the natural ease of water bubbling from a hot spring. The performances manage to be self-effacing without being faceless; distinguished without brazen ostentatiousness. It was a quality reflective of DePreist’s own hard-won worldview.

“We bring our brick to the edifice,” Antal Doráti had once told him at the start of his career. “Don't worry about putting it in front or up high." These words from his mentor, which bespoke of their mutual frustrated ambitions, resonated with DePreist for the rest of his life. “I always, always think of that,” he recalled decades later.

In these recordings, DePreist brings Bruckner down from his habitual forbidding peaks. With grace and care, he makes of these symphonies human-scaled portraits of doubts and hopes, daubed in flesh and blood; its colors tempered by the quiet stoicism which, by turns, consoled and fueled the life and art of this still underappreciated American artist.

This essay will be included in a future Tobu release of Bruckner’s Second and Ninth with the To-kyō under James DePreist.

“Nice to meet you!”: Highbrow tarento James DePreist takes the spotlight in Nodame Cantabile.