Roiling Over Beethoven

The orchestra has been summoned, the instruments tuned, Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony has been ranged on music stands, and still the conductor has not arrived. The rehearsal begins anyway. The Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique is a period-instrument ensemble, well-versed in historical practice, and the concertmaster stands to lead a run-through the way many conductors did in Beethoven’s youth, late in the 18th century--playing and marking the tempo with his shoulders, head and bow. The symphony is half over before John Eliot Gardiner slinks sheepishly through the doors, unwilling to interrupt the work he is supposed to be leading.

The ORR is Gardiner’s own private band. He founded it a decade ago to execute his ideas about how 19th century music should be played, and he calls it into being every time he has a project--in this case a five-concert survey of Beethoven’s nine symphonies that begins Monday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. The musicians, 60 crack players from England, France, Germany and the Netherlands, have not been together for eight months, and now he has heard them going to work without him.

He digs into his briefcase for a baton and instantly demands that Beethoven’s Eighth make a more dramatic entrance than he has. The first bars, he says, should be “immediate, like a door flying open, and there’s this tremendous party going on inside.” Gardiner, a Cambridge-trained reconstructor of the past, has just recapitulated history, reenacting the arrival of the maestro at the beginning of the 19th century. It was, after all, in Beethoven’s lifetime that a conductor became not just a timekeeper but also a molder of sound.

Gardiner wants Beethoven’s music to sound as Beethoven might have heard it before he went deaf--or, to be precise, as he would have ideally liked to have heard it. His musicians use the natural horns, gut-string violins, wooden flutes and dwarf kettle drums of early 19th century Vienna, but they also benefit from a thoroughly modern enthusiasm for history, an ingrained familiarity with the scores and a luxurious amount of rehearsal time. They are clean, well-fed, well-trained, well-paid and well-pleased to be there. Beethoven never had it so good.

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Gardiner’s interest in pioneering the past is part of a family tradition. His grandfather was Sir Alan Gardiner, an Egyptologist who was part of the team that opened Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922. His father tried to re-create part of the thick forests that once covered Europe by planting millions of trees on a bare patch of Dorset countryside. (The farm there is still Gardiner’s home, whenever he is not in London or on the road.) The conductor himself studied history and classical Arabic at Cambridge and came to his current career through music that was then considered hoary: Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610. At the age of 20, possessed by the desire to perform that work, he created the Monteverdi Choir (which joins the ORR in Orange County for Beethoven’s Ninth).

Gardiner’s student years in the early 1960s were a time when the first contingent of earnest university dilettantes began experimenting with what was then called “early music”--anything before the mid-18th century. They armed themselves with odd assortments of rickety instruments--sackbuts, shawms, viols and rebecs--learned to play them badly and made extravagant claims of “authenticity.” Gardiner helped revamp the movement’s reputation for thistle-dry performances and inadequate musicianship with performances that were as electric as they were theoretically correct.

“He was the first to do it who was a really great conductor,” says Jeremy Caulton, a senior executive at Sony Classical who first heard Gardiner in the early 1970s.

Beginning in the early 1980s a cohort of conductors--including Gardiner, Roger Norrington, Christopher Hogwood, Philippe Herreweghe and Nikolaus Harnoncourt--broadened the movement’s scope to include the core symphonic repertoire of the 19th century. They pared down their orchestras, fitted them out with period instruments (or brand-new copies), studied old treatises on playing style, examined the manuscript scores, announced their strict fidelity to the composers’ intentions and developed a leaner, fleeter, lighter sound. What was at first a curiosity has become almost a new standard and an antidote to moribund orchestral-music record sales--thanks in part to Gardiner’s landmark 1994 set of Beethoven recordings, about which Time magazine wrote: “We listen to the music as it was when it was new, in all its terror and wonder.”

Success beyond the groves of academe forced the historical-performance-practice movement to loosen its knots of orthodoxy and its boasts of privilege. Now the most that early musickers will claim is that their performances are “historically informed,” which is another way of saying that the music may have sounded something like this when it was new, but, then again, maybe not. Period instrument performances are, inevitably, a cocktail of scholarship, guesswork and inspiration.

“An exact replica of what happened 200 years ago is not possible and may not be desirable,” says pianist and Harvard professor Robert Levin, who has recorded Beethoven’s piano concertos with Gardiner on early 19th century instruments. “You become as informed as you can, and then there comes a moment when you close the last book, you put on your regalia, walk out on stage and do what you have to do. That’s a matter of intuition and risk-taking and having a point of view.”

If the quest for authenticity proved to be slippery, Gardiner’s goal is even more elusive: to reproduce the effect that old music made in its own time. Beethoven’s Third Symphony (the “Eroica”), reported a reviewer at the first performance in 1805, “lacks nothing in startling and beautiful passages . . . but it often loses itself in lawlessness.” The work’s virtues, the writer felt, were offset by an unfortunate tendency to become “glaring and bizarre.” It’s the sort of review we read today with a smile at the congenital doltishness of critics. Everyone knows better, now: Opinions have progressed, history has spoken, and Beethoven’s infractions became his successors’ rules.

But Beethoven’s symphonies struck many of his contemporaries as works of genius tinged with insanity--they were glaring and bizarre--and if we have lost the ability to feel shaken and dazed by his music, then we have lost its core. Two centuries of reverence have given his works a stultifying crust of respectability, and it is rare to experience it the way Beethoven’s audiences did: as clenched and seething music, often cataclysmic in effect.

Gardiner has made it his mission to recapture that sense of unsettled vigor, of challenge and disturbance. He has, in a sense, set out to prove that wrong reviewer right.

“The most important thing with Beethoven is the feeling of struggle,” Gardiner says. “It shouldn’t sound easy. His whole philosophy of musical production demands tension and difficulty.”

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Gardiner spends his rehearsal time efficiently sharpening corners, beveling edges, intensifying colors, scraping away all traces of vagueness. “Concentrate on the rest,” he instructs the strings. “Bounce off the silence.” The Eighth is one of Beethoven’s more jocular symphonies, but Gardiner keeps introducing hints of violence. “Can we get a more prancy, proud, strutting sound?” he asks. Then, a little later, he asks for a better-defined tremolo, one that sounds “like a dog with a bone: Grrrrrr.”

When he gets to the third movement, which begins with a clomping rhythm and then a supple tune, he asks: “Could you play the first few bars as though it were a really grim Shostakovich symphony that’s going on for ages and ages, and then suddenly it changes?” His players are astoundingly responsive, and each comment gets the music to snap a little more into focus. Gardiner, too, is alert and sharp-eared, his manner gentlemanly but brisk. As the hours go by, he begins to look increasingly disheveled and damp.

A couple of days later, Gardiner--or Sir John Eliot, to those who prefer the honorific--is relaxing at his home in Battersea, a quickly gentrifying neighborhood of high-rise apartment buildings and squat brown houses. There’s a comfortably rumpled, graduate-student feel to the place. Gardiner sits back on one of a pair of slipcovered couches that are huddled in the corner of a vast, sunny living room under a cathedral ceiling. His eyes seem permanently narrowed and his lips pursed into a smile that lingers somewhere between amusement, thoughtfulness and suspicion.

He is a passionate, articulate explainer of his art--so much so that reviewers of his CDs are sometimes apt to pay more attention to his liner notes than to the music they accompany.

“The instruments that Beethoven is using in his heroic phase [at the time of the “Eroica” symphony] are instruments that he is still hearing, and he’s pushing them to the maximum degree of expressive potential,” Gardiner explains.

Romanticism and revolution, in Gardiner’s view, go hand in hand--the overthrow of classical order at the end of the 18th century coincided with the overthrow of France’s ossified regime in 1789. (Hence the name of his orchestra.) Before Beethoven became an icon of greatness, before he became the patriarch of classical music, he was, like so many artists of his generation, a young man in thrall to ideas of revolution. Beethoven was 19 when the Bastille fell, and though his politics became less egalitarian as he got older, he remained a staunch and angry nonconformist. He once famously refused to step out of the way of the imperial family in a Vienna park, and derided his friend, the poet and dramatist Goethe, for scuttling obsequiously aside and thereby failing to assert the supremacy of talent over birth.

The politics, Gardiner insists, are in the music. Beethoven, he feels, “absorbed the French revolutionary composers, particularly their use of music as a stimulus to battle. Of course, he’s a much better composer than they are, so he transforms it, makes it even more overwhelming.”

“With period instruments, there’s a sheer excitement in the sound that you don’t get with a lusher [modern] orchestra, which sounds comfortable and bourgeois and plush,” Gardiner says.

The reference to the bourgeoisie is not casual: Over the course of the 19th century, as concert music became less of an aristocrat’s privilege and more of a form of middle-class entertainment, bigger auditoriums were built to accommodate larger audiences, and the orchestra swelled accordingly so as to fill the new spaces. Instruments were modified to make them louder, more brilliant, more agile and better able to blend into a rich mayonnaise of sound.

It was the spacious late 19th century music of Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler that gave the orchestra we know its thickness of sound and Brobdingnagian proportions, and it was then that the basic shape of today’s orchestra was essentially fixed. All of which makes the standard orchestra a doubly anachronistic tool for playing Beethoven: It is neither old enough to be historically accurate nor recent enough to be truly contemporary. The “modern” symphony orchestra is actually a legacy of the late 1800s--”a 19th century pterodactyl straying into the 21st century,” Gardiner once called it.

“If we were interpreting Beethoven in the 1990s with instruments of our times, such as synthesizers, that one could understand,” Gardiner said in a separate interview in 1996.

On the other hand, period instruments, which are less powerful and brilliant than their brawnier descendants, can seem lost and tiny in hangar-like modern halls. “When Mozart had a symphony performance, he wanted to create a very big noise,” points out Bernard Sherman, author of “Inside Early Music.” “You have to have a bigger orchestra to have the same effect. Period instruments are designed for venues that are no longer economically viable.”

So conductors who wish to be faithful to history are faced with a modern choice: Make less din in a large auditorium, or play in a smaller hall and limit the number of tickets that can be sold. (The Orange County Performing Arts Center’s Segerstrom Hall, with 2,900 seats, is among the larger places the ORR has played.)

To the people who play these period instruments, their weakness can be an asset. John Chimes, the ORR’s timpanist, says he can hit his smaller drums with more gusto than he could those big, bellowing modern timpani, which would drown out everyone else. “I can play with that driving energy and people can see that I’m not holding back,” says Chimes, speaking with some of the same excitement he unleashes in concert. “The instruments don’t have the power, so we have to give it all our power. It forces us to deliver that music with everything we can muster.”

Robert Levin, too, finds expressive potential in the technical limitations of old pianos. “When you play Beethoven on a [modern] Steinway, which is capable of that grand, creamy elegance and power, it has the effect of making the music less risky,” Levin says. “When you’re playing on the old rattletraps that Beethoven knew, you realize how he punished them and pushed them up against a wall. If he had known the Steinway, he would have written music that was radically different.”

Riskiness is a volatile quality in a musical culture attuned by recordings to immaculate performances, and Gardiner has insisted on holding his players up to contemporary (and un-historical) standards of technical exactitude. Still, during the rehearsal, the horns, with no pistons to make their intonation easier, have been bobbling their way through the trio of Beethoven’s Eighth.

“The compromise is technical fallibility,” Gardiner says. “Yes, it’s high risk, but against that you’ve got those incredibly beautiful sounds.”

Beauty--now there’s a thoroughly non-musicological justification. In the end, Gardiner agrees, the use of period instruments is a matter of taste. “I love their vigor, their color, their individuality,” he says.

Taste is the artist’s most powerful argument, but it is nevertheless hard to avoid the sense that Gardiner and his fellow historian-performers also feel that they are simply more correct. That is a claim that does not sit well with the members of those huge, “pterodactyl” ensembles that exist in every major city in the world.

“I play on a period instrument--my period,” growls John Mack, principal oboist of the Cleveland Orchestra. “What in heaven’s name is so great about playing like amateurs on dinky instruments? It’s sort of cutesy-pooh, but it’s got nothing to do with the real world or real music.”

The most probing critique of early-music rhetoric has come from Richard Taruskin, a musicologist at UC Berkeley with a ferocious prose style. “What does early music have to do with history?” Taruskin asked in the New York Times in 1990. “In theory, everything. In fact, very little.” After examining the discrepancies between what historians know about old performance styles and what today’s historically minded performers actually do, Taruskin concluded: “What we call historical performance is the sound of now, not then. . . . What early music has been doing is busily remaking the music of the past in the image of the present.”

Disarmingly, Gardiner agrees. The spirit of his orchestra, he insists, is not a curatorial one. “The goal is to reevaluate the music of the past and to see whether it has relevance to us now,” he says. “If that music speaks to us anew and raises a response, then we’ve won.

“The paradox is that if you go back to the sound world of the composer, you’re actually making him sound more modern. But I’m a bloke in my 50s at the end of the 20th century, and I can only represent the music as I am. You’ve got to keep asking yourself whether you’re still seeing the composer in the best way for today, as opposed to yesterday.”

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Gardiner’s project is by definition maddeningly inconsistent. “What I’m really trying to do is to achieve the unachievable,” he acknowledges. “To strike the perfect balance between what is radical and novel, and what is lasting and beautiful.”

He has, in the process, attracted startling amounts of both vitriol and adulation. (Conductor-composer Pierre Boulez, for example, has mockingly suggested that Gardiner call his ensemble “the Sturm und Drang Orchestra.”) Part of the impulse behind forming his own ensembles was to insulate himself from disbelievers. In the ORR, he has what amounts to a volunteer family, a troupe of dedicated followers.

“Nobody has to be here,” says Chimes, the ORR’s timpanist. “We’re here to do this job. We’re automatically on his side.”

(For many years, Gardiner’s orchestras were quite literally an extension of his family: He married Elizabeth Wilcock, a violinist in the English Baroque Soloists--which he also founded--and she became the concertmistress of the ORR. They were divorced in 1997, and he now lives with his companion Isabella de Sabata.)

It’s a luxurious situation for a radical conductor, and it may help explain why Gardiner, whose major recordings sell more than almost any other living conductor’s, is not a familiar presence in the United States. Monday’s concert is only the ORR’s second U.S. appearance (the first was in New York in 1996), and Gardiner has not always fared well in the usual guest-conducting routine: Fly in, lead two rehearsals and three concerts, then hop across the world to the next orchestra on the schedule.

“I didn’t have particularly happy times as a guest conductor in the States,” he admits, though he has returned periodically to the Boston Symphony Orchestra. “Maybe I’m not a very good guest conductor.”

The members of the Cleveland Orchestra, which Gardiner last conducted in 1994, might agree. Though a number seem to have developed amnesia about those concerts, Cleveland Plain Dealer critic Donald Rosenberg remembers it as “a pretty major disaster. The orchestra was pretty adamant they didn’t want him back.”

Part of the reason for that fiasco is that Cleveland has no early-music tradition to speak of. But Gardiner also has a reputation for being quick with a withering comment and obstinate in matters of detail--qualities that can be better suited to the podium tyrants of yore than to today’s more democratic situations.

“He’s totally uncompromising,” says Chimes. “He’s like a throwback to Toscanini--guys who would not budge until it was coming out exactly the way they wanted it. This morning we spent 45 minutes of rehearsal time just arranging our seating to get the best sound. I love that, but I can see that some people might not.”

That sort of perfectionism can indeed be hard to take--and scoffers like Boulez are quick to point out that perfectionism in performance is very much a 20th century invention--but it is at the heart of Gardiner’s music-making.

“You don’t have to actually like what he’s doing,” Chimes says, “but you do have to respond to the sheer conviction of how he does it. It reminds me of why I wanted to be a musician in the first place.”

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Nine by Five

John Eliot Gardiner leads his Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique in the Beethoven symphony cycle, in concerts over five days this week. Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. All concerts start at 8 p.m. $20-$60. (949) 553-2422.

Monday: Symphony No. 1, Symphony No. 2, plus the “Leonore” Overture No. 2.

Tuesday: Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”), Symphony No. 4.

Wednesday: Symphony No. 5, “The Age of Revolution and Romance,” a presentation by John Eliot Gardiner, the Monteverdi Choir and the ORR.

Friday: Symphony No. 6 (“Pastorale”), Symphony No. 7.

Saturday: Symphony No. 8, Symphony No. 9, with the Monteverdi Choir and soloists Christine Brewer, Michelle DeYoung, William Kendall, Rodney Gilfry.