Ron Gilmour

I’ve spent a lot of time this weekend with Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto, and for an interesting reason. I recently read an article by one Norman Lebrecht on the subject of the conductor Herbert von Karajan, the centenary of whose birth is being celebrated this year. Some highlights from the article include his characterization of Karajan as “Hitler’s poster boy” and the following heartwarming conclusion:

He inflicted his ego on the world of classical music in a way that crushed independence and creativity and damaged its image for future generations. It is not the bad man he was that we should deplore but the reactionary and exclusivist legacy which is being “celebrated”. For music lovers, there is not much to celebrate. Once the centenary is over, we will drop the curtain once and for all on a discreditable life that yielded no fresh thought and upheld no worthwhile human value. Karajan is dead. Music is much better off without him.

I confess, I had previously given little thought to Karajan. Despite a dim awareness that he had some unsavory Nazi ties, I considered him a safe bet when purchasing a recording, especially for something big and romantic. When I decided it was time to own a set of Brahms symphonies, I picked the Karajan set, little suspecting that I was thereby contributing to the crushing of musical creativity.

Before I proceed further, I should probably make an embarrassing confession. I have always been a bit puzzled by the cult of the conductor. While I have many favorite musicians and composers, I can’t say that I regard many conductors as particular favorites. I recognize some of them for expertise in certain areas. I will always favor William Cristie in the French Baroque, for instance. But given a choice between Karajan and Sir George Solti for the Brahms symphonies, I’d probably have flipped a coin. No doubt this reveals an insensitivity on my part to the subtleties of orchestral music, but so be it.

A quick survey of my CD collection revealed a handful of Karajan recordings. In only one case did I have an alternate performance to compare it to: Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto. The Karajan recording is from 1975 with Alexis Weissenberg as the soloist. The alternate performance is conducted by Claudio Abbado (coincidentally, Karajan’s successor at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic) in 1994 with Maurizio Pollini.

The comparison is not an easy one. Needless to say, the quality of the recordings differed. Even with modern remastering, the older Karajan recording sounds muffled compared to the much brighter 1994 Abbado. Also, I confess to being a fan of Pollini, so I’m already biased toward the Abbado account without even considering the quality of the orchestral playing.

Frankly, I find both recordings artistic and engaging. I will say that Karajan’s take is somewhat more forceful and focused, while Abbado’s reading is a bit more relaxed and elastic. The Abbado recording also seems to demonstrate a greater degree of communication between conductor and soloist, but this could be my imagination. On these grounds, as well as my preference for Pollini’s playing, I slightly prefer the Abbado recording, but I can’t quite see the anti-musical Nazi evil in the Karajan. Perhaps a symphonic comparison would have been more telling, since in a concerto even the allegedly autocratic Karajan must share the spotlight. I might also understand Mr. Lebrecht’s criticisms more fully if I had access to a larger number of Karajan recordings. I suspect, though, that Mr. Lebrecht has made the error of letting his distaste for Karajan the man unduly color his hearing of Karajan’s music.

Trollope’s massive Phineas Redux is the fourth of his “Palliser” novels and recounts the further adventures of Phineas Finn, the eponymous hero of the second in that series. When I wrote about Phineas Finn I expressed some dissatisfaction with the ending. I didn’t feel that his quiet marriage to the non-descript Mary Flood Jones was a fitting end to his romantic adventures as an M.P. in England. Trollope apparently agreed with me, for as this sequel begins we learn that “the poor thing died of her first baby before it was born.” Thus unencumbered, and apparently not exactly prostrate with grief, Phineas is lured back to England to be part of the newly forming Whig government. His ensuing adventures cover about 900 pages, a sprawling novel even by Victorian standards.

It seems that at some point during the composition of the “Palliser” novels, Trollope developed a dissatisfaction with the usual limits of domestic comedy. He does not share Dickens’s love of melodrama, but neither is he wedded to Austenian inaction in his plots. In The Eustace Diamonds he takes a strange and problematic detour into crime fiction with a story of jewel thievery. In Phineas Redux he delves into the realm of murder. As in the previous novel, the drama of the case is somewhat lessened by Trollope’s well-known disinclination to deceive his readers, so the reader (and many of the characters) know the identity of the murderer from the start.

During the usual course of politics, Phineas makes an enemy of one Mr. Bonteen, also an M.P. Following a verbal sparring match with Phineas, Bonteen leaves his club and is murdered in the street. His murderer is Mr. Emilius, the bigamous husband of Lizzie Eustace. Mr. Bonteen had made efforts on Lizzie’s behalf to locate Emilius’s other wife in Prague. Nevertheless, all circumstantial evidence points to Phineas, who is imprisoned and tried for murder.

While many characters seem to be in doubt as to the truth of the case, the female cult that forms around Phineas is convinced of his innocence. Madame Max Goesler and Lady Glencora Palliser (now Duchess of Omnium following the death of the old Duke) take up Phineas as a cause. He is further supported by Lady Laura Kennedy (now a widow after the death of her mad husband) and Lord and Lady Chiltern. Madame Max ultimately saves Phineas from almost certain execution by traveling to Bohemia to collect evidence against Mr. Emilius.

Phineas’s nerves are severely frayed by his ordeal and he emerges from prison a changed man. I couldn’t help but notice that he seemed a great deal more discomfited by this threat to his own neck than by the loss of his wife and child. He is suddenly disillusioned with politics and cannot muster his former enthusiasm for the proceedings of the House. He retires from parliament and marries Madame Max, who had proposed to him in Phineas Finn.

Almost as interesting as the story of Phineas Finn is the story of Lady Laura. You will recall that in an earlier novel Phineas had proposed to her and been rejected in favor of Edward Kennedy, a man whom Lady Laura rapidly came to detest. At the end of Phineas Finn she flees with her father to Dresden to escape legal action by Mr. Kennedy. In the present novel, Kennedy continues his fruitless attempts to get his wife back and is driven mad by his failure and by his (partly correct) suspicions that Phineas is the cause of his troubles, even taking a shot at Finn with a revolver at the height of his madness. Finally, his body and mind a wreck, Kennedy dies. If ever a man could leave a merry widow, you would think that this would be the case, but Lady Laura seems disinclined to pass up a chance for pathos. She dons widow’s weeds and goes through all the outward signs of mourning, all the while pining after Phineas in a way that seems increasingly neurotic. Not surprisingly, she develops an antipathy to Madame Max, whom everyone views as Finn’s future bride.

In the previous novel I had considerable sympathy with Lady Laura. She sins, certainly, in choosing Kennedy’s money over her love for Phineas, but her punishment seems worse than the crime. Her single unfortunate choice dooms her to a life of misery and exile. In the present novel, though, she has crossed the line into a very unsympathetic romantic martyrdom. Her unwavering awareness of her own misery seems to overshadow even her love for Finn, to the point that she can hate the woman who saves him. Her descent is not so marked as that of her husband, but in this novel she is not a healthy woman.

In a novel this size there are dozens of themes on which one could expound. One which I find apropos to the present day is the theme of fame and infamy. Finn’s presumed guilt propels him into the public spotlight. Once he is cleared, he is perceived as a hero “merely because I didn’t kill Mr. Bonteen.” While he feels himself to be a broken man, the world at large offers congratulations. Following the Prime Minister’s polite speech on his return to the House, Phineas observes: “If I had happened to have been hung at this time … Mr. Daubeny would have devoted one of his half-hours to the composition of a dozen tragic words which also would have been neat and appropriate.” The entire affair is a very interesting study of the nature of fame and the perversity of public opinion.

While the novel’s observations on fame are probably universal, a particular sub-plot elucidates some interesting matters of a uniquely English nature. The old Duke of Omnium, who has been with us at least since The Small House at Allington at last dies, making his heir, Plantagenet Palliser, the new Duke. Palliser, of course, is an M.P. and is furiously at work on the project of decimal coinage. His sudden entitlement requires his banishment from the House of Commons and the deflection of what he feels to his most important work. He is a useful and earnest bureaucrat who seems hardly equal to the self-important posturing that made the previous Duke so eminently regal. With regard to his wife, the former Lady Glencora, Trollope assures us at the end of the novel that “Of the Duchess, no word need be said. Nothing will ever change the Duchess.”