The
Quality of Tchaikowsky
Last
week in Cardiff two of the amazing pianists he have on our
staff completed a play-through
on piano of an opera by André Tchaikowsky. Who on earth
is that?
In
brief, André was born in 1935 in Warsaw as Robert
Andrzej Krauthammer.
In 1939 he and his family were taken into the Warsaw ghetto,
but his Grandmother, a resourceful lady evidently, had other
ideas. She bought false papers for herself, his mother and
Andrzej, and used for the papers the name of her favourite
composer, Tchaikowsky. André
spent the rest of the war hiding in a cupboard in the bedroom
of a young pregnant girl who André thought must be
the Virgin Mary! Someone certainly prayed for him: he survived.
After
the war he continued his training as a pianist and was rapidly
recognised as an outstanding virtuoso. André eventually
fled Soviet Poland and came to Britain, but despite Rubinstein's
energetic encouragement, André never had the temperament
for the life of a concert pianist. Increasingly, he longed
to compose.
He
managed a legendary piano concerto, premiered by Uri Segal
and Radu Lupu, some chamber music, but then, gripped by his
fascination for Shakespeare, he embarked on an opera, and
chose of all subjects, for a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto,
"The Merchant of Venice."
Quite
apart from his all too authentic experience of anti-Semitism,
it is a brilliant choice for an opera, mainly because of the
way in which the play traverses two vividly opposed worlds,
each suggesting a different type of musical expression. Venice
is the male world of business and money - the World Trade
Centre of its time, a place dominated by hatred, intolerance
and material values. Shakespeare wastes no time in telling
us that this is a bad place to be human:
"In
sooth I know not why I am so sad,
It
wearies me, you say it wearies you;
But
how I caught it, found it or came by it,
What
stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,
And
such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
That
I have much ado to know myself.'
These
are the opening lines of the play, and a modern reader has
no difficulty in identifying Antonio, the Merchant of the
title and the speaker, as a depressive, and one whose tongue
does not hesitate to add to the sum of hate in Venice:
Shylock:
You
call'd me dog....
Antonio:
I am as like to call thee so again,
To
spit on thee again....
Those
who seek love rather than hate, leave: Lorenzo elopes with
Jessica, Shylock's daughter, and Bassanio borrows Antonio's
money to go away to woo Portia, thereby unwittingly putting
Antonio at Shylock's mercy.
By
contrast Belmont, the residence of Portia, is a place of women,
love and music. And the strange device of the caskets which
her wooers must correctly choose in order to gain her hand
carries an unmistakeable message. The winner, Bassanio, chooses
the lead casket, not the gold or silver. The element of monetary
value which is the primary measure of value in Venice is here
worthless.
André
seizes the musical possibilities of these contrasted milieus
with astonishing assurance, as if this were his 5th opera.
The two Venice acts are dark and violent. Belmont is given
music of exquisite lyricism, coloured with references to Renaissance
music-making, and he is also able to do humour, especially
in the two very wittily composed pantomimes for the ridiculous
suitors from Arragon and Morocco.
André's
style could loosely be described as post Bergian - but tonal,
or perhaps more often bi-tonal. It is less dense than Berg,
and frequently explores a really tender lyricism and eloquence.
There is witty and lively music for the chorus, and the big
moments - Portia's "Mercy" speech, the love duet of Rebecca
and Lorenzo, ("In such a night…' ' the text Berlioz
purloined for Dido and Aeneas returned to its rightful context!)
and the horrifyingly tragic debacle of Shylock are all composed
with total assurance - the latter's lonely exit from the court-
room climaxing with a superbly imagined operatic moment when
Shylock opens the doors and is greeted by a shattering cry
of "Jew" from the chorus.
The
two great roles of the piece, Shylock and Portia, go through
dramatic developments which André also seizes on in
their music. Shylock, despite the violence and villainy of
his language, gradually becomes a tragic figure, condemned
to a horrifying, lonely exit. Portia brings female reason
and compassion to Venice, but then she too is changed by her
disguise as a man, and is in some sense contaminated by Venice
and its mores. As the trial progresses and she feels Shylock
increasingly at her mercy, she by turn becomes as ruthless
as he, driving him out to the ultimate humiliation: conversion
to the Christian faith. (Though for Shakespeare's audience
this would have been seen as giving him a chance for redemption.)
At
this moment of supreme power, the women Portia and Nerissa
pull off the intrigue of the rings, forcing Bassanio and Gratiano
to surrender as payment for their legal services the rings
with which they had pledged their love in Belmont. This may
seem like a trivial and unfair trick, after the high drama
of Shylock's humiliation, but in fact it adds another dimension
to the romance of Belmont, teased out with delightful lyricism
in the Epilogue. After all, the men do not give up their wives'
rings for trivial purposes, but in recompense for the saving
of Antonio's life. The intrigue is perhaps a symbol for the
tolerance and understanding necessary for a true marriage
of minds and bodies. It gives depth and reality to the idyll
of Belmont, and the hope that having put their love through
this test, the two couples will survive and prosper in marriage.
I
must be careful not to call it a masterpiece as we learnt
from the Passenger that nothing irritates the critics more
than being told what to think, but it is an enormously important
addition to that small group of operas written in English,
and another valuable Shakespearian work - much finer and more
subtle for instance than Reiman's rather noisy Lear.
We
will do the world stage premiere in Bregenz in 2013, and of
course I hope that it will then not only go to Warsaw, but
also have its British premiere in Cardiff, perhaps in the
course of the 2016 Shakespeare anniversary.
There
is one little personal aspect to this story which demands
the German word which so often comes up around Jewish themes:
"Wiedergutmachung" - making good again - reparation I suppose
would be our term. I have in fact heard the opera once before,
or at least part of it, played by André himself! This
was very shortly after I arrived at ENO, a private performance
for Lord Harewood and a small committee of people including
myself and Mark Elder. I have no memory of it, but that certainly
has more to do with the circumstances than the quality of
the work. Mark remembers that Andrej's piano playing was incredible.
But
now I have read Andrej's diary, with the depressive's intoxicated
anticipation beforehand, and equally pole-axed despair on
receiving the note from Lord Harewood that explained that
ENO could not find room to perform it. Not long after, André
discovered that he had stomach cancer.
Mention
of André's depression reminds me that there is another
very touching personal angle: the depressed Antonio is a very
personal and sensitive self portrait of André himself
- a depressive homo-sexual (it is written for a counter-tenor)
who is the one left poignantly alone (just as Shylock is of
course) once everyone has happily paired off beneath the idyllic
night-sky of Belmont.
The
idyllic night sky over the Bodensee will give us the right
atmosphere to experience this astonishing work for the first
time in 2013. The fact that it is a Wiedergutmachung is a
luxury: there would be no point in doing that if the piece
was not important and utterly convincing. I am thrilled that
we are discovering another valuable piece of operatic literature.
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