"We are happy because we know that our life isn't long. So it's necessary to make use of every moment, to use it properly. It's all hurry in our life—and longing." So wrote the 68-year-old Czech composer Leos? Janác?ek in December 1922 after seeing Karel C?apek's play Ve?c Makropoulos ("The Makropoulos Case"), which received its premiere in Prague that month.
Hurry and longing were no doubt notable features of the final summer of Franz Schubert in 1828, even if he did not know that his respite from the ravages of syphilis would come to a rapid end that November a couple of months before his 32nd birthday. Between August and October, he composed the settings of Rellstab and Heine that would be published after his death as Schwanengesang; the string quintet; and, during September, his final great trilogy of piano sonatas, D 958-960. It is not unusual for pianists to make a recital of Beethoven's three final sonatas, but Schubert's are so consistently demanding, both musically and emotionally, that it is rare to be offered all three in a single recital. As the young Austrian pianist Till Fellner showed, in the recital that drew this year's international piano series at the South Bank to its conclusion, in the hands of a pianist who has the requisite concentration and stamina, it is a programme that is highly illuminating.
Fellner is a pianist whose technique and musicality make his recitals mandatory for anyone who cares about piano-playing, and he has established a fearsome reputation for his performances of Bach, Beethoven and Liszt, as well as for contemporary figures such as Kurtág and the late Ligeti (and I see next season he is programming Elliott Carter). It was not obvious in advance, however, how well suited his sensibility would be to Schubert's late music, which can sometimes seem to demand a willingness for rhetorical gesturing that is alien to Fellner's musicianship. As Robert Winter says in his Grove entry on Schubert, the central passage in the slow movement of D 959, for instance, comes "as close to a nervous breakdown as anything in Schubert's output," and one has not come to think of Fellner as a pianist eager to communicate the horrors of a nervous breakdown. Certainly, Fellner's were supremely unhistrionic performances of these works, but in the event no less powerful for that. Because his technique is so assured, one was able to hear details of harmony and cross-rhythm that are often lost in more emphatic and less subtle performances, and because he has such a keen sense of pianistic colour, he was able to register the most fleeting changes in mood without the need for rhetorical underlining. This was playing which, in its refinement, honesty and indeed beauty of tone, reminded one of the great Wilhelm Kempff. Amazingly, despite having given the same programme in Amsterdam the night before, Fellner showed no signs of fatigue, and the recital was compelling throughout its more than two-hour duration.
A falsified Janác?ek
No 20th-century composer has a more secure place in the operatic repertoire than Janác?ek, and no one can take greater credit for this than Charles Mackerras, whose passion for the composer was formed when he studied with Václav Talich in Prague in the late 1940s. In 1951 he conducted the first British performances of a Janác?ek opera; Káta Kabanová at Sadler's Wells. Eighty last November, Mackerras remains very active, returning to the English National Opera in May to conduct a new production of The Makropoulos Case, which he first conducted at Sadler's Wells in 1965. It was a testament to the flair of Mackerras's conducting, and to the competence, if not the greatness, of the singing that one was no more than very irritated by Christopher Alden's production. This was not a reading of high perversion—though the passage in Act II when he had Baron Prus strip off his shirt came close—but it was a perverse one nonetheless.
The opera's heroine EM is, as Janác?ek says, "a woman 337 years old, but at the same time still young and a beauty." At the start of the opera, she has come in search of the formula for the elixir that will grant her another 300 years of youth, but by the end decides to renounce it: immortality has rendered her cold to the value of life. In order to show how alienated she has become, Alden has poor Cheryl Barker stomping around the set, staring at the floor and striking attitudes, so that we are never presented with a character whose eventual fate can touch us. Instead of a humane opera, which dramatises the need for love if life is to have point, we are given a study in social alienation. In his programme note, Alden writes that her tragedy and that "of all the other characters in the opera lies in their rootlessness." But Alden's vision of a society of alienated individuals is simply false to the opera. It is longevity that has led to EM's alienation, and it is the capacity of the other characters to find value that convinces her to seek death. Even if she cannot become capable of love, she has become capable of recognising its loss—and in this Janác?ek was determined to "touch" the audience. If one did manage to be touched at the ENO, this was because of Janác?ek and Mackerras and despite the production.
