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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Concerto No. 24 for Piano and Orchestra, K491. Second movement [excerpt]. English Chamber Orchestra. Murray Perahia. MK 42242.

Gustav Mahler Des Knaben Wunderhorn “Der Tambourg Sell” (Little Drummer Boy). London Symphony Orchestra. George Szell. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. EMI 7243 5 67256 2.

Richard Strauss Four Last Songs “Frühling” (Spring). Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin. George Szell. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. EMI 7243 5 66960 2 0.

Ludwig van Beethoven Sonata No. 21 in C major, Op. 53 “Waldstein”. First movement [excerpt]. Artur Schnabel. EMI 7243 5 62881 2 6.

Manning Sherwin “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square”. Leslie Hutchinson. AJS 267.

Giuseppe Verdi Rigoletto. Quartet from Act III. Orchestra and Chorus of La Scala. Tullio Serafin. Maria Callas, Giuseppe Di Stefano, Tito Gobbi, Adriana Lazzarini. EMI 7243 5 56327 2 2.

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GILBERT KAPLAN: Welcome back to “Mad About Music” where my guest today is the Academy-award winning screenwriter and acclaimed playwright, Ronald Harwood.

[Theme Music]

KAPLAN: He is one of the most accomplished and critically celebrated of all contemporary dramatists. Nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay The Dresser, he went on to win the academy award for The Pianist and scored a further nomination for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. But some of his most interesting work as we’ll explore today are three plays about conductors: Mahler, Furtwängler and Strauss. Ronald Harwood, welcome to “Mad About Music”.

RONALD HARWOOD: Thank you very much and I’m very pleased to be here. Thank you.

KAPLAN: Now in my introduction I mentioned that four of your plays and films are about music. So we’re going to talk about those today, but before we talk about your work, let’s talk about music and how music first entered your life.

HARWOOD: Well, a school friend of mine invited me back for tea one day after school and said he wanted to play me something and it was Mozart’s G minor Symphony and I fell in love with it. And I’d never heard music like that and I went back and told my mother I had heard this wonderful music. We weren’t very well off so we didn’t have a radiogram, as they were called in those days, but we managed to scrape enough money together to get one and we started to buy records and even, this was in Cape Town in South Africa, a small town, a small provincial town, yet we had a very good municipal orchestra and they gave concerts on Thursday nights, which were called symphony concerts, and on Sunday nights they did a concert called the Prom concert. And the Proms were less expensive than the symphonies and I was taken on most Sunday nights to the Proms. And I fell in love with classical music and it’s remained central to my life ever since.

KAPLAN: Now I read in one of the interviews you have given you’ve had so much interest in you particularly in the British press because of your plays, but you mention that you not only were listening to music as a child but that you actually took your mother’s knitting needle and fashioned yourself as a conductor. Is that right?

HARWOOD: There’s no doubt about it. I came back every day from school when we had the radiogram and I’d arrange a concert: overture, concerto, symphony. And I’d conduct all three works and I was pretty good. I had a terrific repertoire. I never tried it out with a real orchestra unfortunately but I thought I was, I wasn’t bad. It was very flash, rather showy. I think Leopold Stokowski was my idol.

KAPLAN: And did the music improve when you were conducting it?

HARWOOD: Oh, always. And even when I played the records again I thought the orchestra had watched me closely and raised the level of their performance. Fantasy is a wonderful thing when you are a child, of course. It develops the imagination.

KAPLAN: Well, it sure does. I can speak from my own experience. All right, let’s turn to your very interesting music list and I see your first work is Mozart, the first composer you encountered. But in this case it’s a piano concerto.

HARWOOD: This I heard, not for the first time, but the first time it made a very great impression on me was only last year when Murray Perahia played it at the BBC Promenade concert with Haitink conducting. And I thought it was one of the most beautiful performances of Mozart I have ever heard. I am fortunate to know Murray Perahia and so I was very well disposed to the performance but it was so beautiful. The pianissimo was so exquisite that I wanted to listen to it over and over again. That happens to me when I hear a piece of music. I become more or less obsessed with it and have to hear it again and again until I feel I know it. And this is what happened with the Piano Concert No. 24 in C minor played by Murray Perahia.

[Music]

KAPLAN: An excerpt from the second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24, played and conducted by Murray Perahia with the English Chamber Orchestra, the first selection of my guest today on “Mad About Music”, Academy-award winning screenwriter and playwright, Ronald Harwood. All right, now I want to turn to your plays and the first one I want to look at is Mahler’s Conversion about a Jew converting to Catholicism. Now most scholars believe Mahler converted to get the job as the head of the opera in Vienna – you had to be a Catholic to hold such a top government position. And he did convert just before he was appointed, but others feel that Mahler did indeed embrace at least some aspects of Catholicism. Now what was your interest in this?

HARWOOD: My interest was precisely the point you’ve identified. Did he do it for a good career move or did he do it because he had a conversion, a proper inner conversion? The interesting thing I found about Mahler was that he was a mystic in certain ways - he had a great interest in mysticism. But he also had a great interest in his career. And it was a fact: you couldn’t become head of the Opera House unless you were a Catholic. And so perhaps the two things were involved. I’m very careful when I write plays. I don’t write propaganda plays and I try not to tell the audience what they ought to think. I like them to make up their own minds which they’re not used to doing very often. And I did that in the Mahler. As you know it was appallingly received by the critics; it was savaged. It opened in London two days after 9-11. The atmosphere was appalling in the city and it just was ripped apart. I recently reread it in preparation for this program as a matter of a fact and I don’t think it’s half that bad.

KAPLAN: Well I think that’s quite remarkable that the author would be the one to tell about the bad reviews. I was at the premiere of that and I didn’t find it at all deserving of those reviews. I mean, one can always from your perspective find things to improve but I thought the central idea was rather compelling and it was in a way one which we haven’t discussed yet because you didn’t try to uncover the truth about what motivated Mahler but you did raise the issue of what effect this had on him and whether he regretted it or doubted it, or had to live with it in a way he was comfortable with, right?

HARWOOD: Well, I think it haunted him all his life. I mean, I was just discussing a few hours ago with a friend, Schoenberg, who was a Jew, born a Jew, became a Catholic. And then at the end of his life became a Jew again. So that there’s an element of lack of identity in these changes. Well I think Mahler suffered from that. I think Mahler had deep regrets about becoming a Catholic. I can’t remember now but I don’t think he ever went to Mass after his conversion, did he? Do you remember?

KAPLAN: No. But he did have a Catholic ceremony at his funeral.

HARWOOD: But not on his deathbed. I don’t think they sent for a priest. Did they?

KAPLAN: That I’m not sure but I think you’re right. But you know, in the play you play some music and this is not a soundtrack like in a movie. It actually is an aspect of the play. And you picked one of Mahler’s songs, “The Little Drummer Boy” which is a, I guess a bitter funeral march which presents the last thoughts of a drummer boy before execution, probably for deserting. Did you consider Mahler’s converting an act of desertion?

HARWOOD: No, but he may have done. I interpreted “The Little Drummer Boy”, as a matter of fact Leonard Bernstein had this view too – that the little drummer boy is accused of an unnamed crime. As you said it, probably desertion, but it’s unnamed in the song. And I think this was an autobiographical expression that he used the words of the song to express this funereal view of his faith and his identity. And I think it’s a very moving moment and I used it in the play. I have Mahler rehearsing somebody, you don’t see the singer and he tells him what he wants from the song, and quotes the lyric of “Der Tambourg Sell” from Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

[Music]

KAPLAN: Mahler’s gripping song “Der Tambourg Sell”, “The Little Drummer Boy”, sung by perhaps the greatest interpreter of Mahler’s “Lieder” ever, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau with the London Symphony Orchestra led by George Szell. Music that appears in the play Mahler’s Conversion written by my guest today on “Mad About Music”, screenwriter and playwright Ronald Harwood. When we return we’ll discuss two of Ronald Harwood’s plays that explore the relationship between two famous conductors and the Nazi regime in Germany.

[Station break]

This is Gilbert Kaplan with my guest today on “Mad About Music”, the award-winning screenwriter and playwright, Ronald Harwood. Now two of your plays focus on famous German conductors and their relationship with the Nazis. Both stayed on in their prominent positions and some people questioned their loyalty, some people questioned their sanity. Let’s start first with the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler who is the subject of both a play and a movie you created called Taking Sides. But in the play and the film you really don’t take sides, do you?

HARWOOD: No, this is again my view that a playwright should not be a propagandist. I think its boring preaching to the converted or telling the audience what to think. The interesting thing about Wilhelm Furtwängler is the ambiguity of the case. He was certainly not a member of the Nazi party but he stayed in Germany. He played for Hitler. He was Hitler’s favorite conductor. He was honored by the Nazis. He cooperated with them and his own justification was that he did so to give comfort to the German people with whom he felt a great affinity. I simply present those facts and I do it by using an American intelligence officer called Major Arnold who’s brutal, uncultured, deliberately uncultured and vile to him, will have no respect for him, calls him a bandmaster. Much resented by American critics incidentally. That was when it was first done in New York. Now perhaps it would be less so. But the fact was that the American authorities deliberately chose young men from Milwaukee who still spoke a kind of German who they needed for interrogations who were totally uncultured and they did it deliberately. So through the brutal Major, one is able to elicit the story of Furtwängler’s time in the war. The other thing about the Major in the play is that he’s the only one to talk about the dead, about the victims he saw of the Holocaust. Others all talk about music and art and culture. And he is the only one to talk about the human condition.

KAPLAN: Now you don’t reveal your own view within the play or the movie, but you have commented on this issue of the morality of a composer and his music and a quote I saw which was interesting, you said, “I’m not troubled by a composer’s morals when listening to music. That, though, troubles me.”

HARWOOD: I said that?

KAPLAN: I think you’re saying that you’re not affected by this - but it troubles you that you’re not.

HARWOOD: It does. I mean, I don’t listen to Wagner much. But that was because my mother wouldn’t let me when I was as a kid and it never went into me. She didn’t let me because she said he was a Nazi. But many composers have questionable private lives. And it is one of the great fascinations. I mean, I have Richard Strauss ask in the play about him, Collaboration it’s called, why do we always expect great musicians to be great men? And Zweig answers, Stefan Zweig answers, “Perhaps because we’re fascinated by the contradictions”. I’m not troubled by their private lives.

KAPLAN: Well, you know, you mentioned Wagner before and that you don’t listen to it too much because you never got to know it so well. But you know, someone asked Daniel Barenboim why he conducts so much Wagner of all people who of course is an Israeli now, a Jew. And what the paper said Barenboim answered was, “Oh no, don’t misunderstand me, I spit on Wagner, but on my knees” and he therefore expressing that same idea that it’s hard to accommodate the fact that someone can be an awful person and write glorious music.

HARWOOD: Well, I find that very fascinating and I think that’s a wonderful quote from Barenboim. He was very kind. Barenboim, for example, is a great devotee of Furtwängler. And when we made the movie he rehearsed his orchestra in Furtwängler’s tempi. And we used that in the film. He didn’t conduct the film. One of his assistant’s conducted. But he saw to it that the tempi was what Furtwängler used.

KAPLAN: That’s fascinating. I don’t know, that’s the first time I’ve heard that. All right, well let’s come over to your latest play, Collaboration, which focuses on Richard Strauss. And it’s the same question there, but different facts, right?

HARWOOD: Well Strauss was a much more difficult case. Strauss’s daughter-in-law was Jewish. His son had married a Jewish girl. And when the Nazis came to power, he didn’t join the party, but he was coerced into cooperating with them. He became President of the Reich’s Chamber of Music, etc., etc., simply because they put the pressure on him. They said if you cooperate with us, your grandchildren, half Jewish grandchildren will not be touched. Well, that’s quite a difficult decision to make. Do you cooperate with an evil regime or do you save your grandchildren? Now everybody in the play, I think says I have no choice. They say that in Taking Sides too. But of course the very fact that you say I have no choice implies there is a choice. It might be an impossible choice, it might be a very difficult choice, but it’s a choice nevertheless. And Strauss was in this awful trap: either he cooperated or he sacrificed his grandchildren.

KAPLAN: And I think you make it very clear in the play that were it not for his grandchildren, he would not have collaborated. He had many fights along the way and I got the impression that this was this only reason he had to do it.

HARWOOD: He admired Adolph Hitler; he admits to that. He did admire Hitler. He thought Hitler was a savior when he came to power and he thought that the Nazi party would encourage music. But as Zweig, Stefan Zweig, the protagonist in the play, points out to him, “no, they don’t intend to encourage music, they intend to control music.” And when artists are controlled by the state they lose all moral compass.

KAPLAN: Now you picked music to play in Collaboration as well, in this case one of Strauss’s Four Last Songs. You picked the first one, “Spring.” Why that one?

HARWOOD: Well, because we wanted the most ethereal sound. It comes right at the end of the play, when Strauss is giving evidence to a denazification commission, you don’t see the denazification commission. You just see him and his wife. And he lapses into telling them that he is writing songs that are considered old-fashioned now, for soprano, four songs for soprano. And in the one I’ve chosen, “Frühling“, which means spring, you hear the soprano voice at its most ethereal, floating over the words he has to say, or as a background to what he has to say. And we chose it simply because it gave the right emotional tone to what I was doing in the play.

[Music]

KAPLAN: Richard Strauss’s “Frühling”, (Spring) sung by Elizabeth Schwarzkopf with the Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin under the baton of George Szell. Music chosen by my guest today on “Mad About Music”, award-winning screenwriter and playwright, Ronald Harwood – music that appears within his play Collaboration about Strauss’s connection with the Nazis. Well, before we were talking about your plays so now let’s turn to film – in this case let’s talk about film and music. How important is music – and here I speak about the soundtrack -- to a movie’s success?

HARWOOD: Oh, it’s immensely important. When you watch a movie without music you watch a rough cut or final cut before they’ve dubbed the music in, it’s quite another movie. And one of the great gifts of good film composers is to say where you need the music. Now the difficulty is that in the old days of course they dramatize the scene with the music. That we don’t do much anymore. It has to be a background; it has to be an enrichment. But the contrast between seeing an edited movie without the music and then seeing it with the music is immense. And it changes; it changes the film. It enriches it; it enhances it. And it’s rather a wonderful process I think.

KAPLAN: All right, well then let’s talk a little bit about music in your own life. How often do you go to live music?

HARWOOD: Often. I don’t know what you’d regard as often, but about twice a month we go. I love recitals; I love piano recitals. The last one I went to was Kissin a few weeks ago. I don’t remember when the next one is due but Murray Perahia’s recitals. I go to orchestral concerts too. And as a boy, I, of course, I loved the orchestra more than anything in the world. And Beethoven was a great love, of course; he came into my life very early. I suppose with all the clichéd, and what are now regarded as clichéd things, the Fifth Symphony, the Emporer Concerto. Great, great works, but nevertheless played a great deal.

KAPLAN: Well, you mentioned that you’re going to Murray Perahia’s recitals and that you’ve come to know him a bit. Are there any other composers or performers you’ve come to know?

HARWOOD: I know a lot of conductors. I suppose because I’m a kind of groupie. Yes I do – Sir John Eliot Gardner. I knew Solti very well. Solti was a very close friend and a delightful man. We were talking about him today with a mutual friend and we miss him a lot. He was funny and imperious and difficult and enchanting. I know Andre Previn -- we did a musical together with Johnny Mercer called The Good Companions years ago. I love conductors and I know Barenboim but not well. Yes I know lots of musicians.

KAPLAN: OK, now just before we come to your own music again, let me ask you a question about musical taste, your own musical taste. Now, once I read that you said that you stop at Stravinsky because what passes for today’s music is mostly just noise.

HARWOOD: I hold to that. I think lots of modern composers, not all, but lots, confuse noise with music. And I am of an old-fashioned belief that I should be moved by art. You remember in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn has a character say, “If it doesn’t touch me here, in the heart, it’s not art.” And I happen to believe that. I don’t mean you have to burst into tears. I don’t mean you have to be moved beyond expression, but I think it has to touch you. And much of modern music only touches my ear. And that’s my objection. That’s why I find it very difficult to go beyond Stravinsky.

KAPLAN: All right. Well then let’s go back deep before Stravinsky and come to your next piece which is Beethoven.

HARWOOD: Well, I could have chosen any Beethoven piece. But I think the first real Beethoven piece I fell in love with was The Emperor Concerto and it was played by a famous musician of his day who came to Cape Town on tour just after the war called Benno Moiseiwitsch. He was a very famous Russian pianist who came to England and toured and so on and he made it so magically alive. And we also had a very well known South African pianist who was a family friend called Lionel Bowman and he allowed me to turn the pages for him when he did a broadcast of it with the Cape Town Municipal Orchestra. And Beethoven just entered my soul. I think it was Arthur Rubinstein who when he was appearing on a BBC radio program called “Desert Island Discs”, a very famous program, it’s been going on for years. When they asked him what records he would, if he only had one choice, he said “I would choose Beethoven.” In fact he said “I think I would choose all Beethoven if I had to because it’s real music.”

KAPLAN: You didn’t pick The Emporer today.

HARWOOD: No I didn’t. I picked a piano sonata because I think they’re the most extraordinary works of Beethoven’s creation. And the one I’ve chosen, Sonata No. 21 in C major, “The Waldstein”, I think is one of the glories of the piano repertoire.

[Music]

KAPLAN: The opening of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 21, known as “Waldstein”, played by Artur Schnabel, music chosen by my guest today on “Mad About Music”, screenwriter and playwright Ronald Harwood. When we return, we’ll hear Ronald Harwood’s “wildcard”, music that comes from a different genre than classical music or opera.

[Station break]

KAPLAN: This is Gilbert Kaplan with my guest today on “Mad About Music”, screenwriter and playwright, Ronald Harwood. You know, it just occurred to me when we were talking earlier about your play and your interest in Mahler, that you and he have something in common – because I read that you once said, “I do not look for themes to write, they look for me”.

KAPLAN: Now in Mahler’s case he once said, “I do not compose, I am composed.” Sound familiar?

HARWOOD: Oh my God. I didn’t know that. Do you know, I did not come across that. That’s very good, yes. I believe that. I don’t think it’s mystical. I think it’s just a fact.

KAPLAN: Now if the themes come look for you, obviously collaboration with the Nazis is a compelling one. Have you considered writing anything about the conductor Herbert von Karajan?

HARWOOD: No, because I think the case is black and white. I think he was an awful man, marvelous conductor. But, you know, he was denazified by the Austrians. The first thing he did after being denazified was to employ a Jewish secretary. That tells you all. I think he was a career man, he played the game, he courted the powers that be in order to enhance his career. This is again referring back to what we said about people being great human beings and great musicians or great artists. The two are not necessarily compatible.

KAPLAN: And you require, it sounds like, ambiguity in the situation to think it’s worthwhile exploring in a play.

HARWOOD: Absolutely. Otherwise there’s no human interest at all to me. This is - I’m talking personally. Ambiguity is the most fascinating thing in all drama.

KAPLAN: All right, well, this is not going to be ambiguous the next section of the program. It’s called the “wildcard” where you have a chance to pick something that’s not an opera, not classical music. We’ve had some wonderful selections over the years. So, what did you bring us today?

HARWOOD: I brought you a recording by a man called Leslie Hutchinson, better known in England at any rate as Hutch. He was a cabaret pianist during the thirties and he recorded a whole range of songs. He was from Granada in the West Indies, tall, very handsome, adored by women, fathered many children illegitimately, but remained faithful to one or remained wedded to one wife. And Cole Porter said of him that he was the finest self-accompanist he had ever heard. And just to listen to him sing and play the piano is to create for me at any rate nostalgia for a time I didn’t know. I was born in ‘34. He was already famous by then. And it’s just the most wonderfully evocative sound of a time that’s gone but one that maybe I would have liked to live in and the song I’ve chosen is called “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square”.

[Music]

KAPLAN: “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” performed by Leslie Hutchinson, a cabaret pianist during the 1930s – the “wildcard” selection of my guest today on “Mad About Music”, screenwriter and playwright, Ronald Harwood. I now want to turn to the role of music in your own life. Do you listen to music for example when you write?

HARWOOD: No I can’t because I have to listen to the music or write. I can’t do both. I have writer friends who listen to music when they write but I can’t do that. Because I get caught up in the music and then the writing goes to hell. So writing is difficult enough without having distractions. But I listen to music a lot. I mean, when I finish the day’s work I might listen or when I’m in need of a spiritual recreation in myself I would listen.

KAPLAN: That’s an interesting way you put it as spiritual recreation because I was going to ask you whether you turn to music for consolation, you know, something’s gone wrong in your life or something hasn’t gone right in the day. You know, last month on the show we had the former Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating on, and he would describe on the campaign trail getting battered and battered and he would come home and turn to Chopin’s Barcarolle for soothing. Do you turn to music for consolation?

HARWOOD: I do. If I get very bad reviews I do. I’m inclined to turn on something. I love the Gran Partita by Mozart for woodwind and it always makes me feel that life is worthwhile and that nothing matters because it’s so beautiful and so invigorating. Yes, I do turn to music.

KAPLAN: You know, many of the guests that have been on this show have actually revealed music they want played at their funeral. Have you thought about that?

HARWOOD: Certainly not. Funerals are for the living, not for the dead, Gil. If I die before my wife, whatever she wants she can have played. I have no interest in my funeral at all and I’m not sure even that I’m going to attend.

KAPLAN: All right, then let’s turn to your final selection today, perhaps the most famous quartet in opera.

HARWOOD: Well, I’ve chosen this because this is one of the most glorious pieces of music ever written in my view. And certainly the blending of the human voices has hardly ever been better done. And I also choose it because I used it as the basis of a play, another play about music called, how originally, Quartet about four old opera singers in an old-age home and they’re obliged to do something for Verdi’s birthday celebrations, centenary and they decide they will do Rigoletto, the quartet for which they were famous, but their voices are so awful now they’ll mime to their original recording. And that’s the end of the play. And it’s going to be the end I hope of the film we’ll make next year. So it’s very dear to me and it evokes all kinds of memories, not only of hearing it for the first time with, I think with Tito Gobbi, Luigi Fantino, Renato Gili, and I can’t remember, Infantino -- Luigi Infantino was the tenor in a performance of the Italian Opera Company in Cape Town. That was the first time I ever heard it. And so it evokes those memories of my childhood in being touched by something for the first time and also of the wonderful actors who are in my play.

[Music]

KAPLAN: The remarkable quartet from Act III of Verdi’s Rigoletto sung by Maria Callas, Giuseppe Di Stefano, Tito Gobbi, and Adriana Lazzarini with the Orchestra of La Scala led by Tullio Serafin -- the final selection of my guest today on “Mad About Music”, the Academy-award winning screenwriter and playwright, Ronald Harwood. Now as we head toward the end of the show, I have one final question to put to you and it’s something I ask every guest and it’s about fantasies – and here I’m talking about musical fantasies. Now I have a feeling with you I know where this is going, but let’s see what comes out. The question is, if you could be a star in music in any aspect of it, composer, solo violinist, pianist, conductor – anything, what would it be?

HARWOOD: Gil, you know the answer to this, I’d be a conductor. I’d be a maestro. I would conduct as no one else has ever conducted because of the genius which I possess. You know that’s my fantasy.

KAPLAN: I knew you would be going for that one. In your case, you could even use your mother’s knitting needles as you did as a child. Ronald Harwood, you’ve been a wonderful guest today taking us into your life and the role music plays in it. Very grateful your appearing.

Now next month on November 1st, “Mad About Music” moves to WQXR which recently became part of WNYC but now we will appear on 105.9 FM – at the same time: the first Sunday of each month at 9:00 pm. Until then, this is Gilbert Kaplan for “Mad About Music”.

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“Mad About Music”
Gilbert Kaplan, Executive Producer
Heidi Bryson, Producer
Marcela Silva, Associate Producer
Leszek Wojcik, Recording Engineer