In the commentary on Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, and Mahler in "Beyond Performance", we can see how Zhang Haochen's unique aesthetics and judgment are formed, and how those great works nourish his performance and thinking, and in another way, let him release his passion and understanding in the dialogue with the black and white key.
Beyond Performance, by Zhang Haochen, Beijing Daily Publishing House, July 2022.
How many good things can make a person? In Beyond Performance, in addition to the composers whom Zhang Haochen regarded as gods, we can also see him talking about Kant, Von Gounette, Žižek, Baudelaire and even Aristotle, perhaps all art points to the same goal, how we understand and interpret beauty, and give ourselves personality and understanding in it. It is this goal that makes all artists and philosophers go on the same path. Therefore, this little book is the insight given to this talented pianist. We were also able to meet another Zhang Haochen in the spotlight at the concert – a loving young man wandering between the study and piano room, crying in front of Schubert's house.
Today we share a conversation between Zhang Haochen and classical music critic Le Zhenghe. In the field of classical music they are familiar with, beauty not only comes from the unique poetry and romance of music, but also closely related to the times and human nature. However, chasing this interweaving of personality and the times, and exploring the faint light of this personal talent hidden in the torrent of history, is the common pleasure and pursuit of performers and researchers.
Written by | Le Zhenghe
Before I met Mr. Zhang Haochen and his "Beyond the Performance", I wondered why we should use "serious art" to describe a type of music. In fact, to think of it as ritual or solemn solemnity is a huge misunderstanding. Because "serious" should obviously be understood as "serious", this seriousness is not a requirement, but a space with huge possibilities for seriousness. Like different lands with beautiful scenery, you can enjoy the infinite scenery on the ground of "classical music" like "pop music", but at the same time, you can also dig into the huge rich treasures that are not found elsewhere under the land of "classical music", how deep can you dig in? It depends on you, this is the dignity and freedom of every appreciator, and these are the true meaning of "seriousness", it is a possibility, not a constraint or even screening of the appreciator.
Of course, how deep the exposure is depends not only on the person's interest, but also on the talent and time they are willing to invest. Perhaps all those who write the history of musical styles can be broadly divided into two categories. One is the communicator of knowledge, and the other is the pioneer of insight.
Communicators may often lack the memory and mobilization of musical material. Without the accumulation of these memories, it is impossible to break through the barriers that can lead to real insight.
When a person sees a sea of examples in research articles that sometimes lack scores, he can only look around for sheet music and recordings – or even go to a video site to look through recordings with synchronized scores and bar numbers? Or can you often directly mobilize your memory and recall the details of that event, thus saving a lot of time and space? When he sees an example of a musical material, can he immediately realize in his mind the entire structure of the material, and even grasp its position in different styles in a historical period relatively quickly? Mr. Zhang Haochen may happen to be one of the very few who can do this, he not only has an unfathomable ability for artistic expression, but also an amazing ability to remember music. No matter how complex the work, it can be easily and calmly memorized, and when people with relatively mediocre abilities feel envious of his talent, Mr. Zhang Haochen himself certainly can't imagine what those envy feels like.
After all, writing the history of musical style requires not only focusing on what the composer subjectively revealed, but more importantly, observing what the musician inadvertently highlights in his work, examining their authenticity in art, and tapping into their impulses in artistic expression. And when facing extremely prolific musicians like Bach and Mozart, the difficulty can be imagined.
Zhang Haochen was born in Shanghai in 1990. At the age of five, he gave his first piano recital at the Shanghai Concert Hall. He studied under Lin Heng, Wu Zijie and Wang Jianzhong as a child, studied under the famous piano educator Dan Zhaoyi in 2001, and entered the Curtis Institute of Music in 2005 under the then dean Gary Graffman. In 2009, he won the gold medal at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, the first Asian to win this top competition; In 2017, he won the Avery Fisher Music Career Award.
In 2019, I watched musician William Kinderman explain three Beethoven sonatas in the Central Music Concert Hall. Feel the intimate and direct connection between his insight and his hands-on performance. Now I deeply understand that Zhang Haochen is also the person who can open the door to countless insights at any time. Of course, for him now, he must also concentrate on continuing his career as an artist, not only because he pursues him, but also because people love him and want to see his musical charm on stage.
But twenty years from now? Thirty years from now?
Perhaps he will suddenly become an existence that many researchers and all "event musicologists" can only look up to. After all, the great possibilities are already evident in his Beyond Performance.
After all, our world really needs insights too much, and it also needs to be like Charles. Rosen-like pianists!
What is "classical" and why is it serious?
Beijing News: Many solo practitioners will encounter the problem of the so-called "adolescent crisis", and solo music practitioners will realize that their lives will lead to a completely different path from other children, and at the same time realize the difficulties of the solo world and become confused. Did you or a friend close to you face a similar psychological dilemma many years ago? Will there be some negative psychological experiences that need to be overcome?
Zhang Haochen: I can understand what you said. But during adolescence, my experience was relatively smooth, and there was never a serious crisis, such as self-doubt whether it was suitable to follow the path of a performer, or which direction should I go if I gave up professional performance and continued to engage in music? Today's piano children may now have more choices, such as if the sound conditions are good, they can take the direction of pop music and crossover, or they can bias into film and television music, or create popular songs... These are some of the more diverse options available today. But for me, I didn't have fundamental doubts about the future path to professional performance in adolescence, rebellion may exist, but it is far from a crisis.
Many people who have become performers do not necessarily have an adolescent crisis, but they are more likely to experience a midlife crisis, and I am also looking forward to what kind of crisis I will have in middle age, which may be a more difficult problem to solve.
For me, the so-called "crisis" of adolescence is actually very easy to solve. After I went to the United States from China, from an artistic point of view, I felt like I saw a new door. The challenge for me was what kind of pianist I wanted to be, not whether I was fit for music. On the contrary, when in China, if children at that time were considered to play "well", there was actually a fixed standard. But when I arrived at the Curtis Institute of Music, I found that everyone has their own style; From the aspects of teachers and schools, it forms a very diverse and open ecology. It was a new experience for me, but it wasn't a crisis, it was a sense of excitement after a great deal of freedom.
Beijing News: When I got the book "Beyond Performance", I felt that you have an active and strong concern for musicology and music history, which I think surpasses many solo musicians, especially most young performers in the Chinese world. This book is ostensibly an essay by a performer, but in fact it contains a lot of insights, and it also involves a lot of difficult books, and you have a very integrated understanding of the ideas of some famous musicologists and scholars in the field of music aesthetics. For example, Attali's "Noise", such as Adorno's compilation of Beethoven's unfinished manuscripts, and of course the works of Mr. Charles Rosen, do their works have a corresponding evolutionary effect on your own musical aesthetics (such as the tendency towards self-disciplined musical aesthetics and absolute musical concepts, or the title music concept that favors other rhythms)?
Zhang Haochen: First of all, from the establishment of my own music aesthetics, it is Curtis' education that has a great influence on me. Although Curtis is a school that trains performers, we certainly have many courses on the analysis and theory of works. Because Curtis is a conservative school, when Curtis studies musicology or theoretical composition analysis, he will prefer Brahms, or the 3B (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms) tradition. This style completely influenced the establishment of my entire musical preferences from at least the age of fifteen to nineteen.
Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, USA.
Secondly, I have been more partial to the concept of pure music since I was a child, at that time I was not very keen on matching music with a very specific story, some teachers or children themselves will like this, such as when I was a child, I would set a lot of stories when I practiced the piano, I would do this when I first learned the piano, through this channel to substitute music. But to a certain extent, it is the mysterious musical relationship in some kind of music that is more attractive to me, because for me, this is the beauty that cannot be explained and belongs only to music. When I entered Curtis, I began to take the analysis course, and I immediately became interested in the development of motivation and the composition techniques that had been established from the classical period, and the Curtis tradition coincided with my own interests until I was in my twenties. Later, when I slowly walked out of school, I had a new perspective when faced with the so-called new music and title music. For example, I used to hate Liszt, and then slowly developed a love for Liszt's tardiness. This shift in perspective also has something to do with my awareness of a certain literary interest in music. I can feel a broader context that I wouldn't have felt when I was fifteen or sixteen, and it's different from how I thought about music as a child. At that time, I was more interested in pure music, and felt that the value of many works lies in the work itself, which seems to be divorced from the existence of era, nation, background, and culture, because of the charm of its own music system, musical relationship, and value, so music is so great.
Hungarian composer Franz Liszt.
Bringing music to an isolated but sacred existence isolated from everything is the romantic imagination of teenagers. But with a certain accumulation, after understanding various arts, you will find that the connection between music and other arts is not only a musical work, but extends to the overall context of the era behind the musical work. This connection and context is also the depth of the work. For example, you especially like blue whales, but you see blue whales in the aquarium, which is different from the blue whales you see in the deep sea, and it must be the blue whales in the deep sea that make you feel more fascinated, because it is in a broader context. A lot of romantic music in the nineteenth century, when I look at this work in isolation, until there is a connection with the context of the era behind the work, including this era is a very literary, poetic era, I can feel from the work a beauty or an aesthetics that I could not feel at all before.
It was in this perspective that I rediscovered many of Liszt's greatness and total irreplaceability, and Liszt opened up the scene in music, a humanistic concern that was only found in the era of Romanticism. I would not have seen the humanistic care of music itself, and I always felt that the value of music itself seemed to exist separately from the specific environment, but later found that this was not the case. In short, if I had to sum up my aesthetic style, it would be open-ended, and there is no concept of music absolutism like when I was a child.
Beijing News: When I read Beyond Performance, I felt that you also have a concern for the concept of "classical music" and the boundary of meaning of "classical music". Many people in China are trying to define this concept, but interestingly, I think all of them seem to have different interpretations. Your analysis of the concept of classical music is very historical, and you also emphasize the historical evolution of the concept of "work". In fact, Charles Rosen once expounded his judgment on Beethoven's historical positioning, and Rosen used to quote Beethoven's contemporary, E. T· A Hoffmann's analysis argues that Beethoven's historical prestige is absolutely devoid of hindsight, but I think that if the object of discussion was Bach, he would not dare to make such a firm judgment. If "classical music" is positively related to the concept of "work" in the late eighteenth century, then the existence of composers of Vivaldi, Albinoni, and Telemann as the category of "classical music" really cannot completely get rid of the participation of "hindsight construction" dominated by the nineteenth century onwards?
Zhang Haochen: Charles Rosen's judgment of Beethoven at that time was to expound his views in a specific context, and then respond to the academic views of another school, and perhaps his judgment could not be absolutely understood. Some felt that Beethoven's reputation was entirely an afterthought, and he countered it. But let's not forget that Beethoven achieved this near-irreplaceable position in the last years of his life or shortly after his death. I agree with that, but if absolutism is reduced to Beethoven without any hindsight, it certainly isn't.
Charles Rosen (1927–2012): American pianist, music writer and critic. Born in a family of architects in New York, Rosen learned the piano from an early age, and studied under the famous pianist and Liszt's disciple Moritz Rosenthal as a teenager, and studied under the Liszt pedigree. In addition to being a musician and pianist, Rosen has published "Classical Style", "Freedom and Art", "Music and Emotions", "Piano Notes", "Romantic" and many other works.
Beethoven did not achieve the status of deity he has today, because he was an existence that could not be ignored when people talked about the composition group of their music circles, but there would not be such a worship of him today. For example, Weber said that "Symphony No. 7" was written by a madman in a mental hospital. But today few people will listen to "Symphony No. 7" and say that it was written by a madman in a mental hospital, which was the judgment of Weber, a great composer in the music industry at that time! And after Beethoven's First Piano Concerto had just been performed, many music critics said that the first movement harmony of this piece was too violent and unnatural. Thomas Beecham, a well-known conductor in England, said that Beethoven's Late Quartet was written by deaf people, so only deaf people are suitable for listening.
And the E· T· Hoffmann, due to his romantic tendencies towards musical interpretation, even classified Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven as "romantic musicians". Those examples, including the critique of Beethoven, are simultaneous historical phenomena. Today, he must have some kind of post-mortem construction, and there is some kind of post-mortem in everything we look at, such as the perception you just mentioned about early musicians and their social status at that time.
For me, the term "classical music" is a product of romanticism, because it was formed and stabilized in the middle of the 19th century during the romantic period, and naturally represents the characteristics of romanticism, such a retrospective and the tendency to deify the object of retrospective, so that the status of the work will be raised higher and higher, and we will play the works of those deceased masters over and over again, and will form a classical music tradition that has continued to the present.
Listen to the difference: popular culture and classical music
Beijing News: Before the 17th century until the mid-18th century, musicians usually did not regard their works as a kind of consciousness that was admired by people for generations, and their creation and rehearsal were very functional and workable. Film scores are often adapted into suites, and the works are often symphonic. But even if people love this music, they will never compare the interpretation of Star Wars or Jurassic Park theme music by different "genres", and I observed that the Japan Film Conservatory Awards contain a lot of very subtle historical evolutions and transitions, such as Showa Ifukube and Wasagawa Yashishi, they are very academic serious music or concert composers, but when the era developed to the point where people like Hisaishi appeared, Film musicians and classical musicians seem to have really formed a huge divide in Japan, and no matter how hard Hisaishi's enthusiasts try, it is difficult to integrate his music concerts into the category of "classical music". If film is seen as a "holistic art" similar to Wagner's style, can film scores also provide an observation perspective on the boundaries of meaning of "classical music"?
Zhang Haochen: Actually, we might as well think about it, the early films were all mimes, and then silent films with a symphony orchestra or a live soundtrack on the organ. We can almost regard early film scores as a kind of classical music at that time, and can even be said to be a form of classical music interpretation. It can almost be some kind of variant of opera, nothing more than not in the opera house. If Wagner had lived to the film era, he would have been happy to see the medium. Wagner's pursuit of holistic art—theater, music, literature, and stage art—is the result of this combination. But the only thing that differs from Wagner's overall art is that on the set of the film, Wagner (the composer) himself will not be a dictator, the director is. So music at this level, as you said, is more of a kind of work, not completely free to create.
Toru Takemitsu's soundtrack to Kurosawa's film "Chaos" "Hell Scroll" references Mahler's famous work "Earth".
In addition, Wagner wanted art with music as the role of the conductor and the composer as the dictator. And a film as we know it now is a collective art, so it is different from Wagner's vision, and his ideas will only appear in the Romantic era. But back to the film, in its own native state, it can be a variant of opera. Unlike classical music, cinema is a product of mass culture, which achieved its purpose as a popular artistic medium in the early twentieth century. Therefore, as soon as a film is born, it is a work of art and a commodity. On the one hand, we can see a scene where a group of people in suits and leather shoes are sitting in the cinema watching a movie, just like in a concert hall. At the same time, we thought of another scene, in the summer yard children sitting in the square, pulling a screen, playing a movie, and the peddler pawn watched with relish. So film is such a medium, and at the same time it is a product of mass culture and commercial culture. Its characteristics have influenced the development of film soundtracks to a certain extent. The original film soundtracks, even Hollywood movies, were in the classical music style, and in the early days they were inspired by Mahler music. The brass and colors of Mahler music were used in film music, which influenced a number of film creators. Later, all kinds of music, especially pop, popular music entered the mainstream category of film soundtracks, and we saw more light music, jazz, and pop songs becoming soundtracks.
So soundtrack is a very complex thing, its relationship with classical music is very ambiguous, on the one hand, we see that many classical music composers, even very serious and authoritative composers, will also write film scores. On the other hand, we will see that many film scores have alternative musical forms that are completely divorced from classical music. So, I'm open to film music, what it will become in the future, I believe it will give an answer to the film, and it will also give an answer to classical music. Moreover, there is a new ambiguity in talking about movies now, and the future of movies is also questioned. For example, the production of online dramas is no less than the level of movies, so whether there will be online drama music in the future is also something worth looking forward to.
Wagner's operatic work The Ring of the Nibelungen.
Beijing News: A friend asked me a very interesting question, he said that many years after the death of musicians, according to the copyright protection system, these works belong to all mankind, why do classical music CDs still sell for so much money? My explanation at the time was that there was not only the value of the composer, but also the artistic value of the performance of the musician and conductor. Compared to the attitude towards the composer, there are many people who see the performer as part of a huge system of reproduction music, and there is a strong tendency to instrumentalize the performer, what do you think of this concept?
Zhang Haochen: I'm curious, why do people with such ideas first ask such questions from classical music? Of course, I can't say that this idea is incorrect, because everyone has the right to stand up for their own opinion. I'm curious why they don't ask this question from a pop music perspective, and why we remember highly sought-after pop singers and idols instead of lyrics and songwriters.
But the ideology behind this idea is that "the creator is higher than the performer", and if this premise remains the same, you should get more reverence for writing a piece than the person who performs it. So in any case, it should not be pop singers as idols, but pop songwriters and lyricists, so I think the example of pop music can respond to the question of classical music, on the one hand, we have our own favorite works. But can we separate any piece of music we love from our favorite version and then evaluate it? When we think of a favorite work, it is impossible not to have a very favorite version, the two are completely connected, there will be no exceptions.
Glenn Gould (1932 - 1982), a famous Canadian pianist, is known as one of the most spiritually charismatic pianists of the 20th century. He became internationally renowned in his early years and later recorded many famous records, including Bach's "Gothenburg Variations" and other pieces have been regarded as classics.
The first possibility is that there is a person who has never heard a piece of music played, but has just seen the score of this musical work and thought that this work is too great. The second possibility is that a person loves this work very much, but especially hates everyone who plays this piece, because he feels that he is too far from the essence of this work, but he does not know why he loves this work so much. I believe that these are almost impossible except in extremely specific circumstances. So your perception of a great work is directly proportional to how much you like it, or even completely connected. You can say that playing is just a realization of the work, but this realization is precisely the most important part of making a musical composition "music".
Beijing News: I think this may also be a misunderstanding of popular music history writing, that is, too much focus on composers and creators and neglect famous performers and singers in history.
Zhang Haochen: I think there will definitely be this kind of influence. In the fourth chapter of Beyond the Performance, I have probably mentioned this period of history, although it is mentioned briefly, but generally speaking, the composer did not achieve the same status as it is today. Sometimes composers just serve specific occasions. It can almost be said that the status of the creator is lower than the performer, and the performer is lower than the occasion he wants to serve. At that time, there were often performers who came across works by Haydn and Mozart, and then the performers said, you are too difficult, we can't play well, can we change it simpler? This situation shows that composers were not taken too seriously by performers at that time. It is impossible for current performers to say, I can't perform this work very well, so I won't perform it, or change it to simplicity. This situation changed only after Beethoven, because Beethoven really did not take the audience and the player too seriously. He values himself above all else, and he does not compromise on any external constraints.
The film "Mozart".
When we understand this history, we can move forward from the historical stage of Haydn and Mozart, and when we know what the past history of classical music was like and what the status of the composer is, he will definitely re-examine the present.
Beijing News: I read your insights on the relationship between different ethnic languages and music in Beyond Performance. I am also very interested in your arguments, but I only hate myself for not knowing Italian and German at all. How impressive is the influence of language on music that you feel in different parts of the West? In addition, compared with the Chinese system and Chinese music, which have a strong mutual influence on language tones, lyrics and music melodies, do European languages and tones also play a certain role in the spontaneous formation of tonal music and polyphony and harmony in the West? Or, what are the opportunities for polyphonic music and harmony?
Zhang Haochen: I have not studied this aspect, especially the history of national music in China itself, so I don't think I am qualified to talk about it. But as a person who studies Western music, I can stand in the perspective of classical music and make a slight comparison, a kind of music must be the product of a national culture, or an entire ideology.
In particular, I think that music, as such an abstract and spiritual medium, is actually more deeply connected to the whole culture to some extent. From the perspective of Western music, I know that its main characteristic is tonality. On the one hand, I think that the Renaissance thought and artistic emancipation were of great help to polyphonic music, because in the Middle Ages, the Pope forbade polyphony because the Holy See believed that the voice of God should be displayed clean, and there should be no other voice with it; The second is the establishment of the major and minor key system, the construction of the major and minor key system, if the previous religious key was based on the main tone as the core of the key, after the major and minor key system, it is the main chord as the core of the key, such as the existence of harmony. I say two points, the first is that polyphony strengthens the counterpoint, and the establishment of the major and minor key system strengthens the harmony in terms of tonality, so these two are the two major prerequisites that can be formed in Western music in general, especially classical music.
European medieval music.
Therefore, we can also say that pop music, jazz and so on are deeply influenced by classical music, and we can see the historical changes that have taken place in Western music as a whole. This development is of course very different from Chinese music, for example, in the field of harmony, we emphasize the main chord, but this main chord, if it represents stability, represents harmony, must be "resolved" with something that is most discordant with it, such as a seventh chord - a tense chord, in order to become a stable main chord, so there is an opposition between discord and harmony. This does not exist in the consciousness of Eastern culture, and we do not need to emphasize such a logic. Western music has a fascination with conflict, both in Greece and in Christian culture, there must be something binary opposite, which can finally be unified, but this unity is based on some premise or process of binary opposition.
So, I remember Charles Rosen saying that the whole of Western music is a series of creations around the concept of termination. Whether it is the termination of a phrase, the termination of a paragraph, or a termination relationship between two notes, or the termination of the entire work as a whole, and finally to the end of the entire work. Including how to delay the termination and then strengthen the existence. How to set a trap for termination, how to change this termination, to deny this termination, but eventually to this termination, and so on. But the premise is that the so-called termination must be through something that is opposed to termination, and then the termination is reached, that is, we are returning to an end, from the opposite side of the opposite bank to the termination. This duality does not exist in Eastern culture, and we pay attention to the "unity of heaven and man" and the harmony of the whole. We avoid conflict, so you can ask why the Chinese scale has always been a five-tone pattern, we are not without seven tones, but we only use five tones, we prefer to use five tones, and the two tones that are omitted are exactly two dissonances.
Breakthrough and defense: the success or failure of Beethoven and Brahms
Beijing News: You also mentioned Beethoven's "Piano Concerto No. 29 in B-flat major" (hereinafter referred to as Op.106) in "Beyond Performance", especially about the analysis of tonality and the power of negation, I think it is very wonderful. I am very concerned about the third movement of this work, many different people have expressed different opinions about it, Romain Roland seems to have mentioned the question of returning to religion, Kremlov once said that the third movement is a tragic development and a rejection of passion, and involves the choice of paths from society to the individual. Mr. Yang Yandi judged Beethoven's late tone to be the reconciliation of suffering.
For example, like Beethoven's late Ninth Symphony, his final choral movement has a constant treatment of the material that appears in the previous movement. For example, the motive of the first movement appears, and then it is interrupted by the singing of instrumental music, the theme of D minor in the second movement flashes and is also interrupted, and then until the musings of the third movement, after all this is interrupted, "Ode to Joy" appears, and his treatment seems to have a breakthrough, the expression is very straightforward, Beethoven seems to have the meaning of transforming the logical expression of the symphony form into a partial content expression. What is your judgment of late Beethoven?
Zhang Haochen: I think it's very interesting that you just mentioned the issue of "Ode to Joy". In fact, the motivation for "Ode to Joy" appears in the previous movement. So I think Beethoven came to a late stage, especially in his string quartet, which Adorno called "signs of division." But before that, a certain "concept of wholeness" was very prominent in his work, and Beethoven's greatness may lie in his ability to set himself all kinds of obstacles, or signs of division, and finally to return all these motives of division to a whole. Extend it to a certain extreme, and then pull it back to a certain center, so that the integrity formed has a stronger cohesion and tension. I also mentioned this when I wrote Beethoven's chapter. The Op.106 you just mentioned is a typical example.
Beethoven's house in Vienna.
Beijing News: So how do you experience the third movement of Op.106? From a layman's perception, I can recognize the huge difficulty of processing this movement, whether it is reflected in the length or the complexity of expression, this movement should be very difficult for memorization, right?
Zhang Haochen: It doesn't seem to me because I haven't encountered works that are difficult to memorize and play. I think Beethoven's works are easy to memorize and play, such as Op.106, because the logic is particularly strong, as long as you can grasp this logical relationship, the context of the entire piece will appear very clear.
Beethoven manuscripts.
I personally think that Beethoven had a huge impact on later generations, one is "Symphony No. 3 "Hero", and the other is Op.106. I feel that the Third Symphony "Hero" pioneered a new form of the whole symphony, and Op. 106 I think takes a more extreme step in this form, and the whole sonata can be said to be written with a third-degree relationship. After Beethoven wrote Op.106, he wrote to a friend of his: "I have created a new form of composition", and correspondingly, Beethoven had not composed for a long time before that. He stopped working for many reasons, such as his life and a lawsuit with his nephew Carl and Carl's mother. But suddenly, after a long period of creative exhaustion, Beethoven wrote such a work, and he said that I knew how to compose music and created new forms. We now know how he constructed the whole sonata with two notes, or a pair of intervals, and you look at the whole development of the piece, whether it is the Adagio in the middle or the Allegro including the fugue, completely under the control of such a third interval. But what I want to say is that from the beginning of the whole sonata, there is a certain sense of urgency, and it is a work that only a new creative passion can spawn.
Beijing News: When Beethoven arrived in the late period, he seemed to have made breakthroughs at various levels, if according to a linear view of the history of classical music, was he a progressive, or a person who opened up a new era?
Zhang Haochen: Of course, you can treat Beethoven as a progressive. However, when I write about Beethoven, I emphasize his conservatism. Because I think conservatism is essential to understanding "Beethoven", his late period is not characteristic of a romantic, and no romantic, would write such a long fugue in a work like Op.106. In fact, I have always felt that, judging by his late quartet and last few works, including the Grand Fugue, as a creative tendency, if Beethoven had lived to be 80 years old, he would not have written about Liszt or Wagner, but about modern works like Shostakovich or Bartók. You can actually see this trend in the final fugue of his Op.106.
Beethoven in his later years.
So, for me, this conservatism must be an attachment to classicism, a key to understanding Beethoven. To put it bluntly, in fact, he has a conceptual attachment to wholeness; Romanticism, on the other hand, wants to completely dissolve this wholeness, it wants to present everything in a fragmented way, so that each moment has independent value. In classicism, the moment and the part serve the whole as a function. Therefore, Beethoven undoubtedly belongs to the latter. For me, this is also the most attractive thing about Beethoven.
Beijing News: Beethoven seems to have deliberately kept a little distance from the Romantics of the same period. In the 20s of the 19th century, the resurgence of Rossini and Italian opera in particular had already begun, and within a few years even the Grand Opera of France would soon appear. In the late period, Beethoven became more and more in a small circle. Correspondingly, Cherny's understanding of Beethoven's works, especially his late works, in his Guide to Beethoven's piano works has made many descendants feel superficial, and Cherny himself was a close friend and student of Beethoven's time, does this also show that Beethoven has a quality that is ahead of his time?
Zhang Haochen: I don't necessarily think so, because I think Beethoven is not beyond the times, but a product of the times. Whether it is the Enlightenment or the French Revolution, his creations are inextricably linked to the times and the ideas behind them. I can only say that he reflects what seems to me to be another level, the relationship between the value of a person or the work he creates and the value that history gives them.
If Cherny's understanding of Beethoven is not as deep as that of later scholars, I think it is a very natural imagination. Just as we evaluate a contemporary figure and people two hundred years from now, it must be different. In terms of depth, it must be that the deeper he has experienced the precipitation of history, the more magnificent a context he is given. Because this is the value given by time, the value of history.
Austrian composer, pianist and music educator Karl Cherny. He studied with Beethoven from the age of ten.
As Roland Barthes said, "Writing is the destruction of sound, the destruction of the founding point." "The value of a text depends entirely on the vision and judgment of the reader after its birth. The reader also participates in the creation of the text to some extent, that is, the text is no longer dead and closed, but open. In this sense, whether it is Beethoven or other great composers of later generations, it is through our continuous interpretation, analysis, performance, and interpretation, all of which are the recreation of this text.
Beijing News: I have great admiration for the chapter you discussed Brahms, and I think you have quite accurate insight into Brahms' "defense" of classical forms and his own contradictions in guarding an era. In particular, you observe the entire evolution from Symphony No. 1 to Symphony No. 4, as well as his collection of piano sketches in his later years. In fact, perhaps to observe the true so-called style of a composer, it is never always possible to pay attention to what he wants to show, what he wants to swear. Instead, capture what he inadvertently highlights.
Zhang Haochen: Because one of the points I emphasized in Brahms' chapter is that people will see him as a "Beethovenian" composer. But I want to highlight that Brahms is not like that. What I think is more precious to him is his failure to build a grand system. I can't take this failure literally, I mean that the eventual establishment of this structure was itself an outdated attempt, because Brahms was looking back precisely what had been lost. Under such a premise, he goes back to Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, that classical era. And in this retrospective, he tries to construct a wholeness.
Brahms with his wife Adele Strauss.
Therefore, there is a tragic or sad color in his work. I think there is such an implication from his early works, which is central to understanding Brahms' work; On the other hand, his failure directly led him to dissolve such a grand structure, and he finally began to write sketches, began to abandon this large structure, even in the rhythm of the last symphony, no longer the grand ending of the symphony, but a variation written in the Baroque Passacaria style.
I think Brahms may have a special meaning, on a musical level he is a symbol of the direction of classical music throughout the era, facing a complete disintegration of some tonality or classical structure. In such a process, Brahms is almost a symbolic character, and he symbolizes such a transformation.
The Interference of "Repetition of the Era": Recording and Music
Beijing News: Regarding recording, I remember you mentioned in the book the wonderful experience of entering the recording studio for the first time, and also mentioned that the field mastered by the recording studio seems to exert a kind of scalpel-like influence space on music. Is it possible that the impact of this recording process on music has caused an excessive interference in addition to the work and performance? I remember in the first half of the twentieth century, many conductors and musicians had a conservative attitude towards records and recordings, so some musicians might have been more wary of recording studios than live recordings, right?
Zhang Haochen: I don't actually have any special attitude. Because I think there are good sides to recording and there are bad sides. But recording is what I have to face as a performer. I was born in the recording era, and all of us listen to music, and we must listen to the recording more times than to the live. So the recording age will definitely affect our aesthetic, but also affect how we enter music – how listeners listen, for practitioners how to learn music – we will listen to recordings over and over again. Actually, I don't listen to recordings very much, and I don't really want to tie myself to a fixed version. So I don't listen to the recordings much in my normal and practice process. A lot of the recordings I usually listen to are symphonies or quartets. I don't want to listen to piano solos, which sounds strange. This preference of mine is completely ununiversal, because I know that my peers around me are basically very rare, and it is just a personal preference of mine.
Zhang Haochen on stage.
However, the recording must have influenced our playing style. Because I also said in "Beyond Performance", I couldn't keep playing before, and now playing is different. With the recording, the performance itself was also left behind. So, you can say that the performance itself has become text.
Beijing News: In the age of recording, or what Attali calls the "repetition" era, "scalpel-like focus and ruthlessness" is not only in the hands of the recording studio, but in fact indirectly held by analysts, such as nineteenth-century European critics criticizing a performance in literary and philosophical language, they can hardly imagine that a hundred years later, the graduation thesis of the music performance department will compare the spectrum of different versions of the recordings of three performers. If you look at the music of our time, from a macro point of view, is it much more exquisite than the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? For example, because there is no recording, the audience will be more tolerant of the player's flaws. And now for the sake of the quality of the recording, the listener will be more picky.
Zhang Haochen: Yes, that's what I want to say. The recording will definitely make the performance more and more perfect. However, I think there is also a good side to this, which is that recording can present a lot of things that could not be done in the pre-recording era. Although I must have preferred to play live, because it is an ancient but at the same time the most authentic form, some moments have passed and there is no return. And the scene must reflect the transience and instantaneousness of the music, which in my opinion is probably the most precious aspect of music that distinguishes it from other arts.
The Lucerne Festival is one of the main music festivals in Europe, held in the city of Lucerne in central Switzerland. It has been more than sixty years since it was founded in 1938 by the famous conductor of the time, Toscanini.
The subject of music is in experience, which I mentioned in the writing process. It's the music and the black and white words or a painting in front of you, and the feeling of being able to see it all in front of you is different. Music is always a passing form. Even when listening to a CD, although you can listen to it repeatedly, you can pause and rewind to fast forward. However, when you listen, it is always a passing state, always in your own mind constantly checking, conflicting, and then absorbing, reshaping the process of memory, music always has a very subtle relationship with memory. So, in the end, it's just what you remember, and in that sense I think the scene embodies the most enjoyable pleasure of music.
At the same time, recording can be compared with the scene, if I use the word "progress", it can provide another way of listening and experience - recording technology can improve many imperfections in live presentation and orchestration, such as some voices you can't hear clearly on the scene, such as the solo piano in the recording studio can be adjusted from the machine and microphone, so that the listener can hear both the sense of space and the details that cannot be heard clearly in the concert hall. And the presentation of these details makes us have a new understanding of this musical work, and in this sense, recording certainly has its positive role.
Moreover, when we talk about music, we are talking about it in a contemporary context. We can't really go out of the recording era and then look at the recording. When we evaluate a certain performance or a certain piece ourselves, it is also because the machine provides us with various advantages. If I hadn't been online, YouTube, or listened to CDs, I might have written a different book than I do now.
Beijing News: In our busy lives, we often store sounds, but we often don't have the opportunity to actually listen to them. Music now is a kind of companionship for us, for example, when you are at Starbucks, you also want to have music in your ears. But sometimes concerts become a noise, such as one feeling to hear emotionally unified baroque music while rushing to report, and another feeling to hear Beethoven. I think this may also be a limitation caused by the recording era.
Zhang Haochen: This thing can be seen from different angles, I remember Žižek wrote an article saying that Satie's music is a kind of background music, because the music Satie writes is very simple, in Žižek's view, it has "furniture-like characteristics", and it is a completely functional existence, so it is called "background music". One of his subsequent inferences is interesting, Žižek says that the background music is therefore a form of communist music. I don't agree that Satie has anything to do with communist music. I would think Satie is more of a petty bourgeois music that can be consumed. But Žižek's mention of the word communism itself, and the context behind it, made me curious.
Eric Satie, French composer. He was revered as a mentor by the French musical group "Group of Six", the forerunner of the French avant-garde music of the twentieth century.
What Žižek means is that while we pay attention to music in the concert hall, we must raise the level of music. In that sense, music is a conservative thing. Because in concert halls we are not just listening to music, we must have made a kind of deified enhancement of a certain object, such as musicians and performers. You could say that this admiration or pilgrimage mentality must be motivated by some kind of class discourse, or creating some kind of myth of taste and consumption. But it's essentially an old, conservative emotion. But when music is the background, it is only as part of everyday life, in the other trivial details of life. So this dissolution of the sanctity of music, whether from a sociological point of view or from the point of view of social progress, at least represents a kind of progress.
I think Žižek's statement is quite brain-opening. So, I think there are positive and negative sides to the popularity of recording and music, and it can become something for rational consumption. You no longer have to spend time sitting for hours like you did at a concert, lest you miss a note or feel like the ticket money was wasted. With recording, classical music can easily become a functional presence. You can listen to classical music while working, or you can listen to music with red wine as a pleasure.
In this context, music is entirely at the service of other things I want to do during this period, it carries a service function, and it can be easily consumed. At the same time, with the recording, we can walk the street and listen to music anytime, anywhere. We could listen at the playground, we could listen on the bus. So this is when Apple came out with the iPod, and many people said that the iPod changed the relationship between people and music. Because when we say a record in the traditional sense, it can only be in a fixed place. But the iPod changed our relationship with music. In fact, in my opinion, this also highlights the neglected side of music, which is the openness of music. We often talk about the relationship between music and nature and the outside world. But in fact, when we listen to the scene, the concert hall is still a closed existence, and music can only be sounded in this venue.
The opening credits of the movie "Apocalypse Now" use a clip from Wagner's opera "Valkyrie's Ride".
I have a very personal experience, I once listened to the slow movement of Brahms' Third Symphony in the playground, a very sad and melancholy melody. But because it was a playground outside, I had a very discordant sense of blending. A lot of things happen at the playground that change in my eyes. In a sense, this technological advancement is also responding to the problem of film soundtracks we just talked about, that is, you can interact with this scene in different scenes, with a variety of different music. This highlights the openness of music, which has the possibility to blend with the outside world at any time. I listen to it on the bus and at home, and I dive at high speed with me on the train looking at the fields or mountains outside, and different scenes can give me different feelings. And the wonderful thing is that this intermingling also affects how I feel about specific scenes. Such a quality of music may not have existed before. The music you think about on your journey and the music you hear in your memory can make a wonderful difference. This is a wonderful progress brought by technology to music, and it has also led to a very ambiguous state.
Writing/Le Zhenghe
Editor/Tianyuan Zhu Luo Dong
Proofreader/Janin