<<  -- 9 --  Tess Crebbin    DIVING INTO THE MUSIC

TC: Who worked out the Munich program?

WR: Thomas Hampson and I did that together. We always do things together, at least in most cases. We email about it or we talk on the phone. We are in constant communication when it comes to working out a new program. Then, in rehearsal, we work on it again. He is very strict about choosing pieces that he has a personal connection with. If he does not like a certain work, he leaves it aside. Other than that, one of the criteria we use when putting together a program is that we hope it leads on a certain path that can be walked on together with the audience. A concert program without concept is not for us. For the Munich concert, for instance, we took Liszt and Mahler and Strauss. We offered our public the themes of love, war and death. Why? Love is a very nice subject to make music about, isn't it? Then there is the stark contrast, death, which is the ultimate threat even to the purest of loves. So, these are the two basic things we are confronted with in life: love and death, and everything that happens in between. Mahler fits very well into that concept because his war-songs from the Wunderhorn are not actually war-songs but anti-war songs. All the seemingly glorification of war collapses into an anti-war theme. For instance this in-your-face commentary that he gives us in Revelge ...

TC: With these ever increasing tralali tralalai passages, the tambour beating his drum all the way into death, and beyond ...

WR: Exactly. So when Mahler describes war, it becomes an anti-war song because what he does is to show the futility of war. At the same time, even in Revelge, there are the themes of love and farewell.

TC: Thomas Hampson, in an interview, described the image of this song's final scene. Do you also imagine the plot as you play?

WR: Of course, it makes it easier if you enter deeply into the song. But there is a fine line between entering into the story and entering into the story too much. You don't want to grimace too much as the pianist but at the same time you need to feel what you are playing, not only the music but also the action behind the music. There's a nice little story about this, dating back to my time with Fassbänder. A friend of a friend, who had not been to many recitals, came to a concert of ours. Afterwards, he came backstage and asked me: how long did you have to practice until you managed to synchronize your facial expressions? He found that fascinating, but it is not a matter of practice, of course. It is just the expression of both of you feeling the same, which is only natural since you are working yourselves through the same song. You have to feel the song. There is no way around it. Maybe you don't see it on everyone's face, but when it comes to the crunch, it is something we all do, this diving into the story and music.

TC: Now we get to the bottom of it: so, to be a great accompanist, you not only need to be an exceptional team player, sensitive to your singer, able to think quickly, have singing training if at all possible, but you also need to have an affinity for literature or you won't be doing much diving into anything.

WR: That is one point that is still missing, true. You need a deep love for the written word. That was one of my main attractions for choosing this profession: the joining of music and poetry, music and literature, which become equally important in interpreting a certain piece. The love for singing is also important, because then you understand a lot of things automatically that can only happen through the process of singing. It is not just the pianist who brings about the joining of literature and music with his art, so does the singer. Much is revealed from the text, there are tensions, there is hope -- there is love. Schumann makes this process especially attractive because he has his own way of commenting on what is happening in the text.

TC: He is your favorite, then?

WR: I don't have a favorite. I like them all. Another composer who is always at the centre of the Lied genre is Schubert because it was such a focal point of this work. But composers like Mahler are also enormously important. Each composer is significant in his own way. As the years go by, you become increasingly more familiar with them until you think you know part of their personality also. You get to know their habits, might smile at this or that typical trait, and become somewhat personal about the composer. You can bring your own understanding of the composer across to the audience but, as musicians, we must always keep in mind that first and foremost you have to be familiar with the work, which counts for much more than being familiar with the person. There are some wonderful musical works written by composers who were perhaps not so great as people. Likewise, there were wonderful people who wrote mediocre music. Then there are works so great that they seem to come from somewhere else. I still recall how disappointed I was as a child, once I discovered that Bach had really lived. It did not seem credible to me that this wonderful music had done anything else but fallen to earth straight from heaven ... plop ... and there it was. It was such a drawback to discover that Bach was a human being like the rest of us, with normal day-to-day problems.