As he sits astride three of the world’s leading musical centers–Chicago, Berlin and Bayreuth–Daniel Barenboim would appear to have achieved every musician’s wildest ambition.
Five seasons into his tenure as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, he has just completed the 25th year of his association with our orchestra, solidifying his power base at least to the year 2000, when his present contract expires.
His recent successes at the Berlin Staatsoper (where he has served as artistic director since 1992), including the theater’s first complete “Ring” cycle and a new Easter festival that included concerts by his CSO, have reaffirmed his standing as one of the key players in the musical life of Europe’s cultural capital.
Next month he returns to Bayreuth, Germany, where he will open the 1996 festival on consecutive nights with “Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg” and “Tristan und Isolde.” If his 15-year association with the Wagner festival hadn’t already crowned him king of Bayreuth, these productions would guarantee the coronation.
Barenboim has everything.
Everything, that is, but a clear consensus from music professionals that he is yet the major conductor his worldwide fame and success imply. He is a man supremely capable of making the pieces fall into place, but this one piece continues to elude him: Professionally, Barenboim is more respected than loved, admired more for the breadth of his musicianship and intellect than for his ability to draw consistent, or consistently inspired, performances from an orchestra of 100 virtuosi whose collective will may be even stronger than his.
No musician of his generation wields more power or has been able to forge a wider network of political alliances with the movers and shakers of the classical music world. This workaholic’s non-stop industry and his eagerness to embrace all sorts of huge projects–seemingly at once–would certainly crush a lesser artist.
But even those who acknowledge he is a master musician, a man of wide culture and knowledge, an operatic conductor of some flair and one of the great pianists of his generation have to wonder why, at 53, he has yet to hit his stride as a symphonic conductor. “I said he’s a superb musician. I didn’t say he’s a great maestro,” says CSO co-concertmaster Samuel Magad.
Familiar with controversy
Barenboim’s attempts to take the CSO off its monumental pedestal and make it a warmer, more flexible instrument have not met with unqualified success, according to critics near and far. And the inconsistency of his performances–brilliantly inspirational one moment, mannered and fussily manipulated the next–continues to fuel debate.
But Barenboim, accustomed to toughing out worse controversies than ever circled about him in Chicago–witness the adroit career-salvaging he achieved following his messy firing as head of the Bastille Opera in Paris in 1989–takes pains to put the best philosophical face on things. “Different people see music in different ways, and I respect the opinions of others,” he says. “Of course, I am genuinely sorry if there will be people who must hear performances in a manner they find uncongenial. But perhaps, as time passes, there will be opportunities for understanding.”
Those words were uttered by Barenboim in 1991, shortly before he succeeded Georg Solti as the orchestra’s ninth music director. Some time has indeed passed; a recent interview suggests it’s still an open question whether the understanding has taken place.
Discontent with Barenboim’s conducting among some of the 105 musicians of the Chicago Symphony has been widely reported in the local and national press; more grumblings were recounted last fall in a Chicago magazine article, “Playing With Ire.”
But in conversation, Barenboim seems optimistic. He dismisses the dissent among some orchestra members as the creation of journalists, insisting his relationship with the orchestra has never been better. And despite his graying fringe of thinning hair, he still seems the boy wonder who once knelt at conductor Wilhelm Furtwaengler’s feet, whose brash precocities once provoked Leopold Stokowski to remark: “Tell that boy to go home.”
Opinion remains divided
Even if one eliminates petty personal pleading from the equation, the rank-and-file opinion about Barenboim’s leadership skills still appears to be pretty evenly divided–despite the assertion of Henry Fogel, president of the Orchestral Association, that the music director “enjoys the support of the vast majority of the players.”
Some CSO players admire the music director’s attempts to meld his own warmth and flexibility of style with the orchestra’s powerhouse precision developed under Fritz Reiner and Georg Solti. Dale Clevenger, principal hornist, says he considers Barenboim a musical genius on the order of Arturo Toscanini.
But other players resent Barenboim’s attempts to fix an orchestra they don’t believe needs fixing. One veteran first-chair man, one of Barenboim’s more vocal critics within the orchestra, says simply that “things have slid.” Others contend Barenboim’s beat isn’t clear; he can be brusque and insulting in rehearsals; he would rather ad-lib during performances than lead the orchestra.
In this, the Barenboim dissenters (all of whom decline to be identified) echo the sentiments of a member of the Berlin Philharmonic, who recently told London’s Financial Times that “there’s something improvisatory, almost slapdash, about his conducting that makes you think the orchestra is too big and he’d be happier controlling 10 fingers at the piano.”
No one can say for sure what the CSO subscribers feel about Barenboim, pro or con, because management has conducted no opinion polls. Fogel says the subscribers are “very happy” with Barenboim and cites higher-than-ever ticket sales to bolster his claim: Among the 10 largest U.S. orchestras, the Chicago Symphony boasts the highest percentage of tickets sold, 97 percent.
How much of that relates to widespread respect for our world-class orchestra, how much to admiration for Barenboim himself, is hard to determine.
Easier to identify are Barenboim’s salient accomplishments these past five seasons. Thanks largely to his bringing in Pierre Boulez as principal guest conductor, the CSO has sustained a healthy infusion of 20th Century and contemporary music. Barenboim has worked closely and productively with the CSO’s training orchestra, the Civic Orchestra. He has forged healthy alliances among the CSO and other local cultural institutions and made it more responsive to the needs of the community as a whole.
As for some players’ complaint that he lacks a clear, articulate beat, he says he is perfectly willing to conduct that way when he believes the music requires it. But realizing a musical note involves playing “60 percent with the ears, 40 percent with the eyes,” he adds, and this requires the players to listen to one another more acutely, without demonstrative help from the podium.
“Beating time is a very unmusical thing to have to do,” Barenboim explains. “When I give them all the beats, it does not make the music more together, and it is often a lot less flexible. On the other hand, when I am playing the solo part in a Mozart concerto, it really forces the players to listen to each other, which I think is the main duty of a musician.”
Whether or not the Chicago marriage has gone as smoothly as Barenboim maintains, it seems clear he gets along well with the musicians of his Staatskapelle orchestra at the Staatsoper in Berlin. That ensemble has a softer sound and less exacting attack that suits Barenboim’s style more readily than the CSO’s sinewy precision. Observers say he has raised the Staatskapelle’s standards to a remarkable extent.
Barenboim’s other career
So what about Barenboim’s “other” career? Even those who would question his depth as a symphonic conductor continue to praise him as one of today’s most prodigious pianists. What frustrates him the most about juggling his obligations to Chicago and Berlin (and points in between) is that his work in symphonic and operatic music has limited the amount of time he has been able to devote to the piano.
“Since I took on the jobs at the Staatsoper and Chicago, I knew that for a few years I would have to play less so as to really concentrate on what I wanted to do with the two institutions,” the pianist says. “Now I feel I must look for time to play the piano, to get into repertory I have played very little, or not at all. I can’t afford to hold off giving more recitals until I am 65; by then, the fingers won’t work anymore.”
The music director has long contended that the acoustics of Orchestra Hall (rather than his conducting) are the reason CSO musicians have trouble playing together. And so it is partly to satisfy his long-term musical objectives that the trustees have undertaken a three-year, $105 million expansion and renovation of Orchestra Hall that will give the orchestra an enlarged stage and an acoustical canopy, among other improvements. The reborn Symphony Center is scheduled to open in fall 1997.
How many seasons beyond that date Barenboim chooses to remain in Chicago is already an area of speculation in the foreign press. Critic Andrew Clark, writing in London’s Financial Times, thinks it unlikely Barenboim will stay in Chicago after his contract expires in 2000.
Pressed further, Barenboim says he doesn’t want to hold down another musical directorship after Chicago and the Staatsoper.
In Barenboim’s career, art and ambition have always been inextricably twined. Yet musical wisdom and maturity have not always kept pace with indomitable self-belief. It seems perfectly plausible he will make a grab at the Berlin Philharmonic should Claudio Abbado decide to step down sometime early in the new century. And then it would certainly be goodbye, Chicago.
In the meantime, the alliance of Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony will continue, perhaps becoming less rocky as each partner in the marriage learns how to live with the other’s musical and temperamental differences, while drawing from the other’s strengths.
BARENBOIM’S RECENT RECORDINGS
Daniel Barenboim’s recording activity has not slackened one bit lately, as a glance at his most recent live and studio performances suggests. The following CD releases are all on the Teldec label.
With the Chicago Symphony Orchestra:
Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique, La Marseillaise. Placido Domingo, tenor; Chicago Symphony Chorus (in La Marseillaise). 4509-98800.
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5, Overture 1812. 0630-10904.
Wagner: Overtures and Preludes to Der fliegende Hollander, Tannhauser, Lohengrin, Die Meistersinger, Tristan und Isolde. 4509-99595.
Hannibal: African Portraits. Soloists, Hannibal Lokumbe Quartet, Morgan State University Choir, Kennedy-King College Community Chorus, Doris Ward Workshop Chorale. 4509-98802.
With the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra:
Bruckner: Symphony No. 8. 4509-94567.
Bruckner: Symphony No. 6. 4509-94556.
Wagner: Tristan und Isolde. Waltraud Meier, Siegfried Jerusalem, Marjana Lipovsek, Falk Struckmann, Matti Salminen; Berlin State Opera Chorus. 4509-94568.
