The Liberation of Music

Igor Levit in Conversation with Michael Kube

Several centuries of music history separate Muffat and Kerll from Busoni and Rzewski. How would you describe the idea behind this program?

I like to conceive programs by starting with the last major piece and then working backward, as it were. In this case, I had a strong wish to close with Busoni. As a figure, as a composer, a theorist and pianist, he has without a doubt been one of the most influential musical personalities in my life. His Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music is a kind of Bible for me, and I consider the Fantasia contrappuntistica one of the greatest piano works of all time.

In this piece, Busoni not only takes inspiration from Bach’s unfinished The Art of Fugue, but transforms it for the 20th century, so to speak.

More than anything, it’s a kind of release. Busoni essentially unchains Bach’s material—although it’s certainly debatable whether this works or not. At its core, it’s a deeply utopian piece of music, aimed at transcendency. I find it simply breathtaking. This idea of freedom in free music is also, I believe, very important to Frederic Rzewski. In this context, I very much wanted to perform Rzewski’s Dreams II, a piece he dedicated to me. It was commissioned for the Heidelberger Frühling Festival, where I played the world premiere in 2015—one of the most important concerts of my life so far.

How so?

The evening of the premiere also marked my first public performance of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations. As a composer and as a human being who was and remains very close to my life, Frederic Rzewski has contributed greatly to my own freedom. His fearlessness is something I have absorbed intensely in recent years. That’s why these two composers, Busoni and Rzewski, are at the center of this program.

So Rzewski’s piece also allows you some freedom?

He wrote it for me, and we worked through it once together— but that was it. After all, Frederic is a composer who calls for improvisation in many of his works. There are entire passages marked “free improvisation.” Then you can do what you want—you could even improvise for 30 minutes. He really demands this free kind of playing; he is truly the opposite of a dogmatist and a composer who would tell the performer what to do. In the 14 years since I first wrote to him, I have never experienced that.

What should we listen for in Dreams II?

This music has a very powerful narrative. It’s very emotional and picturesque, as if you were watching a movie. It’s very diverse, and truly, profoundly emotional music. For example, one of the pieces is entitled Bells, and you really seem to hear bells resounding. Frederic’s narrative powers are astounding, in all his works. That’s why this music gets so close to many listeners—because it touches them, telling life’s stories. There is no abstract emotional world here. The most important thing is to engage with this music, to simply let it happen.

You open both parts of the program with a work by a Southern German Baroque composer, one by Georg Muffat and one by Johann Caspar Kerll. What is the relationship between these two pieces?

Both pieces, especially Muffat’s Passacaglia, are compositions that also, in a way, break these chains. They are free, improvisatory and playful, courageous and daring. The happiest moment of freedom, the moment of self-freedom and letting the chains go, as the moment of improvisation—this runs through the entire program.

Busoni adapted Bach for the modern concert grand piano. Are you now doing the same for Muffat and Kerll?

I’m a child of my time, and in this time, I have my grand piano. I’m a great admirer of the so-called historically informed performance practice, but I love my instrument and want to play it. Essentially, Busoni is saying nothing else but that this music is as free and unlimited in its intention as a child who just wants to jump around. And then he speaks of the so-called “legislators” of this music, who want to imprison it in symbols and words. He says very clearly that notating the infinite in little black dots means narrowing it down, and the task of the creator is to set this music free once again. You can never capture a musical emotion with labels such as “allegro” or “decrescendo.” It just doesn’t work—it’s too small, too narrow.

How do you liberate the older literature from the late 17th century?

By simply playing it. We live in a world suffering from a lot of attrition, not just politically, but also artistically. Language is shrunk just as much as thought. What remains are phrases that sound incredibly wise, maybe even modest sometimes, but when you think about them for a minute, you realize how empty and puny they are. I’ll give you an example: an artist declares, “I play only what Beethoven wrote.” That sounds great. But if you think about it for a while, you find that there’s an arrogance here. “Arrogance” is not even a sufficient term. What do I know? I know nothing, I don’t know what Beethoven wrote. In which context does Beethoven write a crescendo or diminuendo? What I’m trying to say: an artist does not become a great artist—and this is a phrase you hear often—by retreating behind the work. I don’t understand what that means, either artistically or intellectually. I don’t retreat behind anything. I’m there on stage, I exist, and I have a right to exist. We can’t speak of the free human being all the time and then question human sovereignty and freedom when it comes to the one art form that is the freest of all, which is music. It doesn’t work. And that’s what Busoni is denying when he says that the task of the creator is to make his own laws, not to follow the laws of others. This liberation has a lot to do with self-confidence. With any note I play, I’m not looking for Beethoven’s sound, I’m looking for my own, and I try to understand Beethoven. I’m the one sitting there. These are psychological and emotional processes—I can’t explain to you exactly what happens. But I resent this kind of rigid determination.

Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica is enormously challenging, both technically and interpretationally—how personal is this work to you?

It doesn’t happen often that I’m nervous before a concert, but this Fantasia is a piece that takes me to the limits of my abilities— mentally, intellectually, physically. It is certainly a borderline piece, absolutely. Afterward I am a wreck, a complete wreck.

Dreams and Fantasies - Notes on the Works and Composers

Georg Muffat: Passacaglia in G minor

His paternal forebears were from Scotland, his mother from France, and he was born in Megève in the Savoy Alps. Still, Georg Muffat was known to call himself a German. In his youth, he received comprehensive musical training in Paris, and at the age of 25 he was appointed cathedral organist in Salzburg—a stroke of good fortune, for the archbishop allowed Muffat to travel to Italy for further studies. There he met Arcangelo Corelli, among others, and expanded his musical horizons in all the instrumental genres of his time. From 1690 to his death, Muffat was kapellmeister in Passau. That same year his Apparatus musico-organisticus appeared in print: an anthology of 12 toccatas, a chaconne, a passacaglia, and a final work in free form. For the late 17th century, the anthology represents a superlative, for since Girolamo Frescobaldi’s Books of Toccatas, which had been published in Rome in 1615 and 1627, nothing comparable had appeared in print. Muffat himself realized this, especially since he was the only composer of his generation with first-hand experience of both the French and Italian style. In his preface, therefore, he was able to say: “I am not unaware of the highly experienced men who have excelled in this [musical] science and their [compositional] agility so far; but as I am now almost seventy years of age, I say that since the times of Master Frescobaldi, no one has heard of a similar book being published; therefore the many changes to the [stylistic] nature of the art have seemed to suggest the necessity of this work.”

“A Revolution in Chords” was the title of a review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for a concert by the pianist and composer Frederic Rzewski in late 2018. Indeed, Rzewski, who was born in Westfield, Massachusetts, in 1938, is one of the last musicians of his generation inclined to exhortation. A creative artist from an early age, he studied with Walter Piston and Randall Thompson in Harvard and with Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt in Princeton before continuing his training with Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence. Here his career as a contemporary-music pianist began; he was subsequently influenced by further studies with Elliott Carter in Berlin and by his acquaintance with John Cage, among others. Rzewski’s notable self-image as a political composer dates back to the years after 1966, when he co-founded the ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva in Rome. The experience he gathered there with the combination of notated and improvised music is also reflected in the four parts of Dreams II, written in 2014. Although the score is completely written out, Rzewski frequently allows his performers to choose a rhythmic and chronological interpretation, finally asking them in the introduction to the concluding Wake up! to “Play the notes, think the words.”

Johann Caspar Kerll: Passacaglia in D-minor

Johann Caspar Kerll was almost preordained to be an organist: his father, who had originally trained as an organ builder, had moved to the small town of Adorf in Saxony in 1625 and taken over the vacant position of organist. Despite the ongoing Thirty Years’ War, Kerll moved on to Vienna and Rome for further training in the mid-1640s. In 1647 he was appointed chamber organist in Brussels; in 1656 he became court kapellmeister in Munich, where his responsibilities included the Court Opera. There is no supporting evidence for the claim that he later worked as an organist at Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Through his renowned organ and composition students Kerll acquired an outstanding reputation as a teacher. As a composer, he established modern Italian opera and sacred music north of the Alps; at the organ he was famous for his brilliant improvisations. Johann Nikolaus Forkel called him (together with Johann Kuhnau, Handel, and Bach) a “German Orpheus” in 1778—an Orpheus, however, whose work had somewhat faded from view by that time. The Passacaglia in D-minor shows Kerll as a composer whose use of chromatics took full advantage of the harmonic possibilities of his time and whose musical imagination seems to have been positively stimulated by the ostinato bass line characteristic of a passacaglia.

Ferruccio Busoni: Fantasia contrappuntistica

“Listened to Kunst der Fuge yesterday. Wonderful!! A work considered mathematics so far. Most profound music!” Alban Berg’s enthusiastic comment about a performance of Bach’s The Art of Fugue dates from 1928. Indeed, until well into the 20th century, this work was considered an encyclopedic tract on counterpoint whose final four-part fugue supposedly had remained unfinished due to Bach’s death (today, it is speculated that sections of the finale, in more or less completed form, may have been lost). Inspired by the Chicago-based German organist Wilhelm Middelschulte, Ferruccio Busoni, who had made an intense creative and pianistic study of Bach’s oeuvre, conceived his Fantasia contrappuntistica as a preface to Bach’s fugues. Early in 1910, however, he decided to incorporate “all the elements of a fantasy in the fugue itself.” He thereby created one of the most demanding works in the entire piano literature, both in technical and interpretational terms. In its final version, the Fantasia consists of a preludio corale (based on the melody “Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr”), followed by the first three fugues (the last of them built on the note sequence of B–A–C–H [B flat–A–C–B in German notation]), an intermezzo, three variations, an intricately constructed fourth fugue, and the reprise of the chorale. The work ends with a stretta that finally comes to a halt on the note D, stretched across six octaves.

Translation: Alexa Nieschlag

Dr. Michael Kube is a member of the editorial board of the New Schubert Edition and has edited numerous urtext publications. He also works for the Berlin-based classical music streaming service Idagio, curates the Dresden Philharmonic’s family concert series, and is a juror for the German Record Critics’ Prize. He teaches at the Stuttgart Musikhochschule and at Würzburg University.