Artist Profile: Conductor Antonello Manacorda
/By Raymond Beegle
11/4/2019
[Editor’s Note: Classical Voice’s Raymond Beegle chats with Berlin-based Italian conductor Antonello Manacorda two weeks before his November 16 Metropolitan Opera debut, conducting Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.]
Photo: Nikolaj Lund
“The highest to which we can attain is wonder; here is the limit,” writes Goethe, a man well known to Antonello Manacorda. It seems that this disposition of mind or soul is ever present in the 49-year-old conductor who is making his Metropolitan Opera debut this season with Le Nozze di Figaro. Even during a battle with New York traffic and New York crowds, he talked about the things that evoke wonder, the great things, and the great people, Goethe, Manzoni, and Mozart among them, that have filled his mind and heart and do not abandon him even in this frenetic city.
Although we had never previously set eyes on each other, we found we had friends in common: the aforementioned Mozart and Goethe, as well as Voltaire, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Primo Levi, and the brilliant Da Ponte, who synthesized Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro into a flowing, pulsating libretto, and whom Maestro places in the ranks of our Shakespeare: “Mozart sat by Da Ponte’s side, writing his immortal music as words were sometimes still in the process of becoming sentences and paragraphs!”
Photo: The Metropolitan Opera, “The Marriage of Figaro”
I had not known this surprising aspect of their collaboration, which Maestro Manacorda detailed with great enthusiasm, nor did I know of the rhythmic designs and motives of the text, so well developed by librettist and composer, that serve a practical as well as an artistic purpose. “At that time, I’m sure you know, there was no conductor. Mozart at the harpsichord with his first violinist at his side, had to hold the entire ensemble, singers and instrumentalists, together. They relied on the rhythm and meter of both text and music. That is why, when a singer asks for a ritardando at the end of a phrase I can answer ‘sorry, Mozart won’t allow me to do that!!’”
Regarding the historical aspects of the play and the opera, he had much to say: “Of course, the work itself is based on a politically volatile issue: the right of the aristocracy to commit crimes, under the guise of law and tradition, against the common people who spend their lives obliging their entitled masters. A great political issue! But I think every action we take, consciously or unconsciously, is a political statement.”
Raymond Beegle: Even the late Beethoven string quartets?
Antonello Manacorda: Yes, I think the revolutionary elements of their form make it so.
Photo: The Metropolitan Opera, “The Marriage of Figaro”
RB: If music is a political statement, is it also a moral one? What do you think about the Greeks who had such clearly defined views of what is good and what is bad? Plato and Aristotle believed that listening to good music would make a person good, and listening to bad music would make a person bad.
AM: Although I agree that music is a moral issue, I don’t agree with the Greeks. Music can’t make a good or a bad person, but great music can give thoughtful people insight, direction, vision.
RB: Do you think the Greeks were right in forbidding certain classes, students of law or athletes, say, from listening to and playing certain musical modes? Can some music be labeled dangerous, as they think?
AM: No. There is no such thing as dangerous music. Of course, there is some music I don’t care to listen to, but it still has something to say to someone.
“History is only a series of repeated waves or cycles. We never learn from the mistakes.”
RB: Music and politics! What strange bedfellows! What about Furtwängler’s opposition to the Nazis? Goebbels tried to use Beethoven and Furtwängler as propaganda while the conductor insisted that music was absolutely apolitical.
AM: Those horrible fascist times! I fear they are about to be repeated today! You know Manzoni said that history is only a series of repeated waves or cycles. We never learn from the mistakes, or the crimes of the past. I know Furtwängler stayed in Berlin to preserve the great traditional German ideals, but I think I couldn’t have done so. I would have flown! I observed that history maintained a strong presence in many Furtwängler performances. In 1943 Berliners picked their way through the rubble to hear Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony, and the recording, especially the adagio movement, reveals something beyond words, something that one does not hear in other performances from quieter times.
“I tell the countess ‘wait! – have a pause – use silence – before you answer “I forgive you.””
RB: Do events and circumstances make the audience hear differently, the musicians play differently; does it make you conduct differently?
AM: Yes, the only comparable thing I was involved in was a concert in which I played as first violinist in Sarajevo just after that tragic Bosnian war. I saw some of the devastation, and of course it made music more dear to me, its great truth more real to me. And the effect on the audience? Of course! On all of us! But the audience is always part of the performance. It is a mysterious triangle: composer, musicians, and audience. One hears the audience. Their impact is most powerfully felt in their silence. Silence is a great element in a performance. In Figaro, for example, when the count askes his wife’s forgiveness in those beautiful phrases, I tell the countess ‘wait! – have a pause – use silence – before you answer “I forgive you.” It is a profound moment. Her life is ruined - over - perhaps she thinks of suicide.”
RB: But what about Beaumarchais’ third play, The Guilty Wife, in his trilogy?
AM: I don’t think Da Ponte took that into account. I think that Rosina is a tragic figure and there are hints of her wanting to die.”
RB: If there were to be an opera to the third Beaumarchais play, who would you have had write it? (I suggested Bellini because of his host of guilt-burdened, troubled heroines).
AM: No! I stay away from bel canto! My teacher and mentor Abbado stayed away from bel canto! I suppose maybe Prokofiev would do a good job! I think of his Love of three Oranges.
Photo: The Metropolitan Opera, “The Marriage of Figaro”
RB: Is there a different approach when your orchestra is an accompanist in the pit rather than the main attraction on stage?
AM: No. An opera is a whole. It is not voices with orchestral accompaniment. Everyone is equal, and the shortcomings or personal requests of a singer don’t come into play. A phrase is a phrase, and it has its demands whether the singer can meet them or not!
RB: There are millions of funny stories about singers and their temperaments. How about the personality of orchestras? The New York Philharmonic, for example, has a marked personality of its own. No matter who is on the podium, they will deliver a lustrous, homogenous, and generally energetic performance. The Met orchestra, on the other hand, varies tremendously in quality. I have heard them sound like the voice of heaven, and, with the wrong conductor, like a mariachi band!
AM: Ideally one forms a deep, warm relationship with the players. At first they don’t know me and I don’t know them. I feel entirely naked standing before them. Then, hopefully, as we work on the great music we form a bond, a deep one, like the one I have with my orchestra in Potsdam.
“We begin to see the return of Fascism in our own time.”
RB: Do you have any comments on your recent concert program addressing tyranny, which included Schönberg’s Ode to Napoleon and Beethoven’s Eroica?
AM: As we begin to see the return of Fascism in our own time, I wanted to paint a picture of what tyranny looks like, and the human reaction to it of enlightened people.
RB: Virginia Woolf called St. Paul a poet and a seer. Is that true of the great composers? Let’s compare Mahler with Schönberg; what did they see and how did they react to it?
AM: Schönberg wanted to express the dark side, to look evil straight in the eye. Mahler wished to direct us to the sublime, the ideal. I would like to say that there are only three composers who take us from the center of the earth to the heights. They are Bach, Schubert, and Mahler: Bach through his structural perfection, Schubert through his simplicity and purity, Mahler through his sense of sound, of orchestration, and his idealism.
Photo: The Metropolitan Opera, “The Marriage of Figaro”
RB: Regarding the difference between singers today and those, like Tiana Lemnitz, Carl Erb, and Lotte Lehmann, whose sensibilities were formed before the two World Wars: I think that after those dark times, especially after the Second World War, Europeans, especially Germans, were intent on rebuilding. They did not want to look back at suffering, when they had suffered so much, and caused so much suffering. They wanted to clean the wreckage of the past and create beauty. Maybe today they are moving past this.
AM: Oh yes, there is ‘today’ with its new set of issues! What about screens? Television screens, movie screens, computer screens, iPhone screens? It has done terrible things to us, separated us from each other, even from ourselves, and from nature. It’s truly a dilemma and I don’t know what the answer to it might be.”
RB: What are your latest insights, and your growth as a human being?
AM: That’s a lot to think about! Let me try to answer at least part of your question. First, I have a little more understanding of music, a deeper intuitive sense of where a line is going. Of course, music, the great works are infinite. I’ll never get to the end of them – nobody will! Also, I come more and more to see that I am a servant of music, that I am called to its service. Are we not all servants in this world? I strongly believe that, and I don’t like it when the word “servant” is used in a derogatory way!”
Photo: Nikolaj Lund
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I was reminded of Manacorda”s countryman, Giuseppe Mazzini, who said that an artist is one of two things: he is either a servant or a more or less smart entertainer. Among musicians I have interviewed over many decades, very few saw themselves as servants. Lotte Lehmann, Licia Albanese, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Paul Badura-Skoda, Arsentiy Kharitinov come to mind. Perhaps their awareness of this great truth is the mysterious alchemy that transforms the fine artist into the great artist.
Raymond Beegle reviews classical music and opera for the New York Observer and Fanfare Magazine. For many years he was Contributing Editor of Opera Quarterly, the Classic Record Collector (UK), and also appeared on The Today Show (NBC) and Good Morning America (CBS). As an accompanist, he has collaborated with Zinka Milanov and Licia Albanese. Currently Mr. Beegle serves on the faculty of Manhattan School of Music in New York City.