Conductor Bernard Haitink dies at 92

The New York Times reports:

Bernard Haitink, an unaffected maestro who led Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra for 27 years and was known for presenting powerful readings of the symphonies of Mahler, Bruckner and Beethoven conducting orchestras on both sides of the Atlantic, died on Thursday at his home in London. He was 92.

Here's Beethoven's 7th Symphony conducted by Haitink — the famously moving second movement starts at 13:18:

The Times obit gives a sense of Haitink's personality:

Mr. Haitink let the music emerge from the orchestra, often transcendently, without imposing a heavy-handed interpretation that a star conductor might.

His self-effacing nature was noticed early on.

He was “not one of the glamour boys on the podium,” Harold C. Schonberg, the chief classical music critic for The New York Times, wrote in January 1975 after Mr. Haitink’s debut with the New York Philharmonic, conducting Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7.

“He does not dance, he does not patronize the best tailor on the Continent,” Mr. Schonberg continued. “But he is a dedicated musician, always on top of the music, getting exactly what he wants from his players.”

Reviewing his performance of the same symphony with the Philharmonic in 2011, the critic Steve Smith wrote in The Times: “Some conductors strive for mysticism in late Bruckner; Mr. Haitink, with his unerring sense of shape, transition and flow, lets the music speak for itself, with results that can approach the supernatural and often did here.”

Haitink conjures the towering greatness of Brahms's 4th Symphony:

More from the Times:

His reputation for being unassuming trailed him throughout his career. In 1967, Time magazine described him as “a short, quiet man who likes to take long bird-watching rambles in the woods,” and pointed out that “in a profession where flamboyance and arrogance are often the hallmarks of talent, the diffident Haitink is an anomaly.” A New York Times article in 1976 carried the headline “Why Doesn’t Bernard Haitink Act Like a Superstar?”

Mr. Haitink’s colleagues lauded his modesty, integrity and musicianship when he was awarded the prestigious Gramophone Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015. The pianist Murray Perahia, who recorded the complete Beethoven piano concertos with Mr. Haitink and the Concertgebouw, praised him as being “dedicated to a real collaboration: neither dictating an interpretation, nor slavishly following — but a natural give and take.”

Haitink brings Debussy's cinematic La Mer to life:

The Times on how wartime in Haitink's childhood affected him as a conductor:

Bernard Johan Herman Haitink was born on March 4, 1929, into a well-off family in Amsterdam. His father, Willem Haitink, was a civil servant, and his mother, Anna Clara Verschaffelt, worked for the French cultural organization Alliance Française. Neither were musicians. The family lived under Nazi occupation during World War II, and Willem was imprisoned for three months in a concentration camp.

Mr. Haitink referred to his youth as his “lazy days.”

“I wasn’t stupid,” he explained, “but I just wasn’t there. Half the time we were taught under our desks because of air raids. But even when things became normal, I wasn’t interested. Maybe this is why now, when I am over 70, that people always ask me why I work so hard.”

Shostakovich's merciless 4th Symphony:

The New York Times obit ends with this:

In 2011, in [an] interview with The Guardian, Mr. Haitink mused on the strange life of a conductor. “I have been doing this job for 50 years,” he said. “And, you know, it is a profession and it is not a profession. It’s very obscure sometimes. What makes a good conductor? What is this thing about charisma? I’m still wondering after all these years.”

And here's the last symphony by one of Haitink's signature composers: Bruckner's 9th.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (1925-2012)

The New York Times obituary describes Fischer-Dieskau's experience as a German in World War II:

[I]n 1943, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and assigned to care for army horses on the Russian front. He kept a diary there, calling it his “attempt at preserving an inner life in chaotic surroundings.” . . .

“Lots of cold, lots of slush, and even more storms,” read [one entry]. “Every day horses die for lack of food.”

It was in Russia that he heard that his mother had been forced to send his brother to an institution outside Berlin. “Soon,” he wrote later, “the Nazis did to him what they always did with cases like his: they starved him to death as quickly as possible.”

And then his mother’s apartment in Lichterfelde was bombed. Granted home leave to help her, he found that all that remained of their possessions could be moved to a friend’s apartment in a handcart. But as early as his second day home, he and his mother began seeking out “theater, concerts, a lot of other music — defying the irrational world.”

Instead of returning to the disastrous campaign in Russia, he was diverted to Italy along with thousands of other German soldiers. There, on May 5, 1945, just three days before the Allies accepted the German surrender, he was captured and imprisoned. It turned out to be musical opportunity: soon the Americans were sending him around to entertain other P.O.W.’s from the back of a truck. The problem was, they were so pleased with this arrangement that they kept him until June 1947. He was among the last Germans to be repatriated.

Here's Fischer-Dieskau singing "Gute Nacht," from Schubert's Winterreise (with Murray Perahia on piano):



Many of the comments on that YouTube video were posted today, echoing the song title:

Gute Nacht, meine freund ;(

(The third movement from A German Requiem by Brahms.)

The top 10 greatest classical composers (4, 3 . . .)

(The complete list.)

4. Bach

Bach composed during the late Baroque, so he didn't forge a new style the way Haydn or Debussy or Schoenberg did. And the Baroque style itself is more limited than the music that would follow him. Yet he's so widely called one of the top 3 composers of all time that I feel slightly apologetic at ranking him "only" #4. Evidently, greatness is not just about originality. Bach transcended the limitations of his era and brought an intellectual depth previously unknown to Western music.

I think of him as generally mild-mannered and contemplative, but he was also capable of overwhelmingly intense emotion. Here's "Herr, Unser Herrscher" ("Lord, Our Master") from the St. John Passion, conducted by Jos van Veldhoven:



Bach's Cello Suites allow the cellist to explore melody alone, in a way no other composer has equalled. Here's Hidemi Suzuki playing No. 5 in C minor:



If you wanted to choose one little piece by anyone that perfectly distills the idea of pure, simple music for music's sake, it would be hard to do better than the 1st Prelude of the Well-Tempered Clavier (played here by Lang Lang):




3. Brahms

Schoenberg famously wrote, in an essay called "Brahms the Progressive," that Brahms had been misunderstood as one of the more conservative composers of the Romantic era, and that in fact he foreshadowed the atonalism of the 20th century. Fortunately, we don't need to take a stance on this musicological issue to become immersed in the autumnal world of Brahms, where every note seems to be aching or yearning or striving for something. Brahms, who died in 1897, often sounds to me like he's saying a long farewell to pre-Modern classical music itself.

The first movement of the Piano Trio #1 (Op. 8) has one of the most beautiful melodies I've ever heard (played here by Alexi Kenney, Oliver Herbert, Roman Rabinovich):



Here's the first movement of A German Requiem, where the non-religious Brahms put his individual spin on a traditionally Christian genre. Here's the whole thing, conducted by Jeffrey Thomas. The first 2 movements are spell-binding.



Here's Brahms's 4th Symphony (his last), conducted by Klaus Mäkelä. Does music get any better than the first movement of this symphony?