原文德語，轉(zhuǎn)載于 zeit.de

Music must be directed against the stupidity of the world, says Michael Gielen.?A conversation with the 82-year-old conductor about the struggles he has fought in his long career and the conservative tendencies in the music business today

By?Volker Hagedorn

Michael Gielen comes through the hotel foyer.?A strong, medium-sized man of 82 years.?He takes a seat, we talk a bit about Lake W?rthersee outside, the same one that?Gustav Mahler?looked at while composing a good 100 years ago and whose banks are now, according to Gielen, "broken".?He and his wife Helga first holidayed here 50 years ago when their children were very small.?Now the two are here again for the cure.?Helga brings her husband a glass of tea.?"Thank you, my heart," he says.

DIE ZEIT:?So this is the woman that Adorno wanted to steal from you.?You describe it in your memoirs.

Michael Gielen:?Yes, but as a minor matter!?You can also see from this book that I consider him one of the greatest thinkers as far as I understand his philosophy.?There is nobody who would have written something comparable about music.?He has done a lot for me.?He was only a bit dubious towards women.?He was crazy about blondes.?If Helga had been a noble too, dear Teddy would have gone completely nuts.

ZEIT:?Adorno was also friends with your uncle, Eduard Steuermann, the pianist who was highly valued by Arnold Sch?nberg and his circle.?Does it matter to you that you have a family connection with the Second Viennese School through Steuermann?

Gielen:?A decisive role!?Imagine having an uncle who studied with Schoenberg!?Although with him he had a terribly difficult relationship.?Basically, Eduard only composed after Sch?nberg was dead.?He suffered so much from being around this genius.?He once complained to him that he had serious inhibitions when composing.?He tells that to Sch?nberg!?Eduard was intelligent enough to know who the cause of his inhibitions was!?And Sch?nberg says it's not that difficult, talks to him and takes notes while he's doing it.?Suddenly there are 20 bars, that makes sense, the tonal advances, and then Sch?nberg says: Let's see what we have there and analyze it with him.?He wrote that during the conversation!

ZEIT:?Humiliating.

Gielen:?Terrible, isn't it??To live in the environment of such a super genius.?But the relatives really impressed me.?At home in?Dresden?, before we emigrated, there was a pocket score of Sch?nberg's?Pierrot Lunaire?that my mother had used.?She had taken over the speaking part and painted the meter into it: one, two, three... And Sch?nberg's?opus 19?was lying around, the piano pieces, when I was eleven I tried to decipher them.?It was my duty to deal with it.

ZEIT:?Before the Nazis, your father, the director Josef Gielen, who was sympathetic to social democracy, married a Jewess, fled first to Berlin, then to?Vienna?, and finally to Argentina.?There you began to compose yourself.

Gielen:?In 1946 I was in a student fraternity in Buenos Aires against Perón, we took to the streets against the fascists.?The Nacionalistas, the Nazis, of course also took to the streets.?There was always jostling and shooting.?Once I escaped a fight through scaffolding.?There was someone with a slat waiting for someone to come.?I was.?My right side was covered in blood.?My parents found a secretive doctor for me that night and decided that politics would be enough.?They sent me south.?That's where I started to compose.?I put it down to that hit on the head, it brought me to my senses.

ZEIT:?But you always understood music as political.

Gielen:?Everything you do is related to the way you live, and that's political.?But unlike Eisler, I've never tried to introduce factual political ideas into compositions or to compose such texts.?The attempt to use intelligence when making music, to go into practice on the basis of analysis, which does not mean that it has to be less sensual, is an eminently political act. And making music from the gut, which is so popular, is one too.

ZEIT:?Which you accept.

Gielen:?How so??

ZEIT:?You admire Wilhelm Furtw?ngler's "incredible power of suggestion", and in your book you write about?Carlos Kleiber?: "He knew how music works without having to know the theory behind it."

Gielen:?It's not the same.?Furtw?ngler convinced with the power of personality, even if everything he did with Beethoven was wrong according to our criteria, Schoenberg's criteria.?Or if you want: Beethoven's criteria.?(laughs)?Carlos, on the other hand, was just a brilliant musician.?He didn't need the analysis because he knew how to do it, his instincts never pushed him in the wrong direction.

ZEIT:?But you go further.?As a conductor, you?inserted Sch?nberg?'s?survivor from Warsaw into Beethoven's?Ninth .?That made history.?And you demand of today's composers that one should not write peaceful music, otherwise one could immediately get drunk.?They expect music to worry people.

Gielen:?Yes, of course.?Above all, that it is directed against the current so-called civilization, which is ruled exclusively by money and in which stupidity is encouraged by governments - only stupid people can vote for these governments.

ZEIT:?You are now receiving a respected prize, the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize.?Is this the final integration of the subversive?

Gielen:?It starts much earlier.?Because what can I do if I'm not allowed to conduct an orchestra??But what can the orchestra achieve if it doesn't have a conductor in front of it who understands something about the world, about the music??Look at who is being celebrated like this, that's bad!?Regressive in the highest degree!

ZEIT:?There is a need for charismatics...

Gielen:?Welcome, if someone has charisma, great!?But that Thielemann gets Dresden is also a political phenomenon.?And aren't the people of Munich crazy to hire?Lorin Maazel?now ??He smiles like a crocodile and conducts like one.?He can do a lot, my God!?When he was 25, he was discovered for Vienna.?Of course I went, I was a year older and hadn't achieved anything, he was already … he has Martin?'s?Cello Concerto?rehearsed by heart.?He must have a photographic memory, because learning that is an ordeal, a very boring, stupid piece.?Maazel was incredibly gifted, but even then he had that dominant technicality.?I didn't want to scold my colleagues.?But he doesn't treat me as a colleague either.?(laughs)

ZEIT:?You never conduct by heart.?Why?

Gielen:?I can't remember what people play in detail.?At first I thought, ridiculous, everyone conducts by heart, now I do it too.?I was supposed to do Beethoven?Eighth?, the first Beethoven of my life.?I looked at the score and looked and closed it.?Of course I knew the tunes.?But if you had asked me what the second clarinet was playing at this point or that – I have no idea.?Then I thought, no...

ZEIT:?Does that rub off on making music?

Gielen:?Of course, if you really have the thing in your head, the eye contact is better and faster.?I deeply disagree with my friend Daniel Barenboim about a great many interpretive things, but I know that when he conducts something by heart, he knows every note.?Or Simon Rattle with Mahler's?Fifth?- I saw him on TV from the front - you can't look because he's such a hysteric, but how he manages it!?It's incomprehensible how quickly this happens, these contacts.?I don't know if the musicians also feel monitored, but I found the way he is with them very impressive.?

ZEIT:?Do you still conduct a lot yourself?

Gielen:?As long as I can still do it physically, I'll go to my friends' orchestras a couple of times a year.?Very good things come out of the Berlin Staatskapelle.

ZEIT:?In the next season you will rehearse your own work with the SWR Symphony Orchestra, whose honorary conductor you are,?Four Poems by Stefan George?for choir and instruments.?This is a youth work, a good 50 years old.?What are you composing now?

Gielen:?I stopped composing.?The 2001 piano piece was the last.?I can not think of anything more.?It would only be possible to recycle things that have already been said, as others do, like?Pierre Boulez?, for example.?But that's not given to me.

ZEIT:?You have moved an incredible amount through premieres and new interpretations.?In the 1980s, the "Gielen Era" in Frankfurt established director's theater in the opera.

Gielen:?Director's theater sounds as if there were no music in it.?I would rather say: music theater with good direction.?And we didn't start successfully at all.?That was only possible after?Aida?, the dramaturge Zehelein and the director Neuenfels have accomplished this turnaround.?The fact that people ran there was of course also due to the scandal.?But it wasn't like it is now with "director's theatre", where you invent a different piece and put it on, it was the real content.?If you read the?Aida?cleverly, it's about war and love and the church and the military.?Verdi was an ardent pacifist and certainly had his doubts about the colonial aspects of his composition.?That the second finale in the?Aida?music is so bad, but there is a reason for it in terms of content.?I like that.?It's the most wonderful music before and after, and the second finale really sucks - those marches and the chingboom.?It has to be like this!?The vulgar music is exhibited.

ZEIT:?You value Verdi as a composer who is politically alert, and you wrote that music should "paradigmatically present people with the conflicts of their time and within themselves"...

Gielen:?She doesn't have to, she does!

ZEIT:?But, naively asked, what does Beethoven know about the Cold War, about 9/11?

Gielen:?It was completely enough for him to know about the French Revolution.?He himself was a leftist at the time and betrayed the cause in 1814 with the worst play,?Wellington's victory,?having the greatest success.?The?seventh?is also a problem for me, it's so terribly triumphant.?Sure, Napoleon had become emperor, he himself betrayed the revolution, I know everything.?Nonetheless, the Napoleonic Code remains a step forward from what came before.?Beethoven wasn't stupid after all.?Surely he couldn't suddenly have declared his allegiance to the princes out of conviction.?He had to in order to earn.?Vanity probably comes into play as well.?Finally he was celebrated!

ZEIT:?Pierre Boulez, the other great conductor of your generation who is also a composer, thinks that there is no connection at all between quality and morality in art.

Gielen:?Of course he's not wrong.?Yes, what shall we do with Wagner??One cannot say that the scores are immoral.?Sch?nberg was a monarchist and revered his Emperor Franz Joseph – there was no mention anywhere of his ideals of freedom.?But the music speaks of social conflict.?This means that he divided his brain into two departments.?What he said and his consciousness obviously stayed with Franz Joseph, and the layer that dealt with the terrible problems was pushed aside.?But that comes out in the music.?This is something for psychoanalysis.?

ZEIT:?You prefaced your book with a motto by Sigmund Freud...

Gielen:?Freud and Marx are the great teachers of mankind, but no one wants to know anything about them anymore.?I believe that all the theories do not apply one to one, but that everything is transformed.

ZEIT:?Have you ever considered doing a psychoanalysis yourself?

Gielen:?I once went to a professor who said after about an hour that my problem was that I had never had a conflict with my father and therefore hadn't learned to fight.?A bit strange, because I had to fight desperately!?At work!?It took me ten years as an autodidact to develop a conducting technique for myself.?Until I was able to differentiate the hands and knew that the right hand doesn't just contain the beat, I was already standing in front of large orchestras.?And when I was able to conduct, there were fights about my ideas.?It's certainly extraordinary that someone has never had a conflict with their father.?But I see that as lucky.?I was totally supported, my parents saw that it couldn't be stopped.

ZEIT:?In 1965 you fought very hard for Bernd Alois Zimmermann's opera?The Soldiers?- one of the great operas of the 20th century.?The orchestra in Cologne initially found them unplayable.

Gielen:?They didn't want to play it, the general music director Günter Wand was behind it.?He used to be friends with Zimmermann.?Wand thought Zimmerman was going the wrong way and wanted to sort of save him by preventing the soldiers.?But when Zimmermann sent me the first act, it was clear to me after five minutes that it had to be performed with all the necessary sacrifices.?The thing just had to come out.

ZEIT:?How do you know after five minutes that a score is brilliant?

Gielen:?You see ideas.?You can see the style.?The wonderful melody, the meaningful polyphony, how the voices react to each other, how they interact.?You can see the color, which is completely original in the piece from the first moment.

ZEIT:?You have conducted many premieres, but for the last 20 years you have been pessimistic about the guild.?Modernity is in hibernation...

Gielen:?There was no new beginning after the great Expressionist awakening and after the Second World War, seriality, that is, Webern and his successors: Boulez, Stockhausen.?It may be because I'm too old to understand what the younger ones want.?I find most music that is written regressive.?Helmut Lachenmann, Gy?rgy Kurtág, Klaus Huber write wonderful music.?Two of them are over eighty!?This is not a departure.

ZEIT:?Even with Karlheinz Stockhausen you only accept the early works.

Gielen:?When he said he knew what was happening on Sirius, I turned away from him in horror.?I haven't heard a note either.?

ZEIT:?At least you are inclined towards astrology.?You're not that rational.

Gielen:?(laughs)?But this hubris, he knows what's happening on a star – that's nonsense.?I don't know if astrology is nonsense.?Why should these great celestial bodies be there if they don't stand for something??I cannot imagine that there is anything senseless in the universe.?There's a lot we don't understand.

ZEIT:?That's where you come into the realm of faith.

Gielen:?Well, of assuming it's possible.?I can't believe in... goanix.?Except for physical things like music.?And that has another dimension.

The conversation was conducted by?Volker Hagedorn