‘So, Nikolaus, what’s your concept of swing...?’

In another life I write about rock music and jazz and answers to that poser have proved endlessly illuminating over the years. Swing is a nebulous phenomenon – to hear is to know – and demystifying swing is why jazz writers want to bend the ear of distinguished jazz musicians; that and divining their thoughts on improvisation. Get clarity about those two things, and you’ve pretty much cracked into the bedrock of their music-making, and quite possibly their attitude to life itself. But on anyone’s list of unlikely musicians to quiz about it, Nikolaus Harnoncourt might expect to find himself near the top. Somewhere in the Herbert von Karajan, Daniel Barenboim, Gustav Leonhardt ballpark, I suspect.

However, with his 80th birthday looming on December 6, Harnoncourt has a surprise. He has recorded George Gershwin’s 1935 opera Porgy and Bess, realising an ambition that has been incubating since his childhood growing up during the darkest period of Germany’s history. His formal styling – Count Nikolaus de la Fontaine und d’Harnoncourt-Unverzagt – is some indicator of how deep the Harnoncourt genes drill into the marrow of Austro-German tradition. Born in Berlin in 1929, Harnoncourt was brought up in the Austrian town of Graz. But he’s potty about Porgy and Bess. As we settle down to talk, Harnoncourt fixes me with an ardent gaze: ‘I invested three years of work in Porgy,’ he stresses. ‘I can’t remember any other piece I so urgently wanted to perform.’ And – who’d have guessed it – he’s got plenty to say about jazz, swing and improvisation, too.

The Harnoncourts – his wife is the violinist Alice Hoffelner – live in a converted church situated in a picturesque village, 30 minutes by car beyond Salzburg. The past year has, sadly, been a tough one for Harnoncourt. Niggling health concerns obliged him to withdraw from a scheduled appearance with the Vienna Philharmonic at this year’s Proms, and his summer, instead, revolved around a gruelling series of hospital appointments. The worst is now, thankfully, behind him. In fact the Harnoncourt who greets me today looks every bit as fit as when I interviewed him in 2003 – under discussion on that occasion, the Beethoven piano concerto cycle he had just cut with French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

From all those pianists gagging to play Beethoven concertos with him, that Harnoncourt plumped for Aimard – protégé of Yvonne Loriod and Boulez, a pianist more renowned for his Ligeti, Carter and Messiaen – is revealing. It says: don’t fence me in, don’t typecast me as a Germanic conductor. Recording Porgy and Bess, of course, tips a whole other scale of unlikeness. But it is a recording with Harnoncourt’s trademark inquisitive fingertips plugged into every pore.

His dramatic pacing is positively Hitchcockian. Then again, you’d expect that from a conductor with Monteverdi and Mozart operas jogging through his veins. The sonic balance between his singers (Porgy is played by New Zealand-born singer Jonathan Lemalu, Bess is Isabelle Kabatu) and a noticeably light-on-its-hooves Chamber Orchestra of Europe is exquisitely poised, allowing hitherto unheard details to blossom. The CD booklet comes with a characteristically scholarly essay by Harnoncourt about Porgy and Bess’s performance history and a description of how he has forensically unravelled radically contradictory versions of the opera. He separates out what he considers the travesty of later Broadway productions (‘they turned it into a damn musical’) and Otto Preminger’s 1959 film version (‘I switched off after five minutes!’) – and the piece we think we might know from pop-song treatments of ‘Summertime’ and ‘It ain’t necessarily so’ by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Janis Joplin – to take an educated shot at reimagining a version Gershwin himself might have embraced as the opera he wrote.

‘I might have been the first European to hear Porgy and Bess,’ Harnoncourt reflects, as I ask how a young boy growing up in 1930s Graz came to hear the piece. ‘My uncle was in New York during that period, and sent my father a beautiful book of Gershwin songs – from Porgy and Bess, but other songs too. As adolescents my brothers and I were fascinated by the ink drawings that illustrated the book, because some of the pictures contained nude girls. But I was also interested because my father sang the songs and accompanied himself on the piano. I can still sing these songs to this day.’

And he does. To prove his point, Harnoncourt launches into a song from Of Thee I Sing; diction care of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, rhythmic bounce by Tony Bennett. He then explains how his father’s songbook was mislaid after the war but, as he puts it, ‘my memory was connected with reality’ when earlier this year his younger brother traced a replacement copy over the internet. Harnoncourt hugs the book to his side – it bonds him with his first memories of Gershwin like Proustian madeleine cake. ‘After the war,’ he continues, ‘American groups toured Porgy and Bess around Europe, and sometimes the performances were conducted by Alexander Smallens. Smallens conducted the first performances under Gershwin’s own eyes: he must have been a good conductor and he certainly knew the correct idiom [readers can judge for themselves, thanks to the recently issued live performance under Smallens on Guild, 8/08]. But, I must say, I’m angry about how he treated the opera after Gershwin’s death. He cut the transitionary material and replaced the recitatives with dialogue. But Gershwin said – explicitly – that only the white characters should speak. The black characters must sing throughout the opera.’

Has Harnoncourt’s research revealed why? ‘It was impossible for black singers during the 1930s to make their name on Broadway or in opera houses,’ he elucidates. ‘There were very gifted black singers – Gershwin auditioned nearly 100 Porgys – but they could perform only in the theatres and clubs of Harlem. Gershwin was in a position of influence and wanted to help black singers perform on the American opera stage: this is why he said Porgy, Bess and the other black characters must always sing. The Maria in my recording is Roberta Alexander. When she was younger it was impossible for her to sing at an American opera company, she told me. To find a career, she had to come to Europe.’

Which brings us to the nub of Harnoncourt’s musical relationship with Porgy and Bess. If the ‘Culture Industry’ – musicologist Theodor Adorno’s term for the entertainment industry’s exploitation of art for cash – has sought to cherry-pick the showstopping hit tunes from Gershwin’s score, Harnoncourt’s intent has been to reclaim Porgy as an opera. Naturally, he’s not the first conductor to do so. In 1976 Lorin Maazel recorded what was flagged up as ‘the first complete’ Porgy and Bess. Simon Rattle’s legendary 1988 recording (featuring Willard White) used essentially the same edition; while John Mauceri’s 2006 version was an attempt to replicate the original 1935 Broadway production. But Harnoncourt’s account is the first to question the validity of the text itself. Using principles of historically informed practice honed during his performances of Bach, Monteverdi and Beethoven, Harnoncourt has weighed the purely musical sources against letters, diaries and other contemporaneous documentation before arriving at his own considered performance edition. That’s what to do about a problem like Porgy and Bess.

‘I heard a performance in 1970 which I hated,’ Harnoncourt explains. ‘There were no recits, and the tempi were not what Gershwin had indicated. I was moved because the hit songs were there; but that’s when I realised the limitations of playing Porgy as a “number” musical.’ I wonder if unpalatable racial undertones determined this notion of Porgy as musical – the idea that black music has no place on the operatic stage? Harnoncourt suspects the reasons were more pragmatic: ‘It was more a question of creating a commercial success,’ he thinks. ‘To construct a musical from the hit songs is not difficult. There are two composers I think of as being showered with melody. One is Dvorák – he always has three times more melodies than he needs. And Gershwin…not like Brahms suffering for years trying to work out a melody of five notes. That Gershwin would write hit songs, even in a complex opera like Porgy, was unavoidable.’

Now Harnoncourt hits his groove. I listen. ‘When Gershwin travelled to Europe in 1928 he had lessons with Nadia Boulanger. Whatever has been discovered about Western music she knew, and Gershwin recognised that he must study with her. His goal was to write the American opera. Such a piece would, obviously, draw on American sources. But Gershwin knew that opera was a European form, and said that Porgy should be somewhere between Meistersinger and Madame Butterfly. In Vienna he met Alban Berg, and they became good friends. Berg gave Gershwin a score of Wozzeck, and this had a profound influence on Porgy’s development; although I feel Gershwin’s influence on Berg in the jazz sections of Lulu. When Marie sings of her sadness about betraying Wozzeck with the Drum Major, her melodic line is constructed from a chain of thirds – when Bess sings ‘I loves you Porgy’, it’s practically the same notes. That Gershwin felt Bess and Marie were connected on a deep level is very convincing for me.

‘So I believed in this piece as an opera, but I didn’t trust how its history had misrepresented it. Then came this performance of Maazel. He played every note Gershwin had written and it was a sensation for the musical world. Now we knew exactly what was there. I was thrilled to hear it. But to claim that Gershwin wanted Porgy to be performed in this way – this I don’t believe.

‘I worked from three sources to prepare my version: the published piano score and a piano reduction that Gershwin gave to Smallens, filled with his pencil annotations and instructions. Then the Gershwin estate sent me a copy of his autograph score. This told me many, many things: in the published score, for instance, ‘Summertime’ is marked at around crotchet=96; in the score Gershwin gave to Smallens, he revises that to 72. These corrections were derived from Gershwin’s practical experience of working on that first production, and must be respected. I discovered “lost” music, too. In Act 2, just before “Bess, you is my woman now”, Porgy sings the line “Yes, Bess, Ifeels you ought to go” and Bess replies to the accompaniment of a solo cello. This passage is in the autograph score, but is missing from the vocal score.

‘Was it really Gershwin’s intention to play the whole opera as it was composed? His own score clearly shows cuts; I tried to identify them all, and find out why he cut so much music. I concluded there were three main reasons – the strain on the singers, to make the piece dramatically tighter, and because the performance had to start at 7.30 and finish before the subways closed. It is not difficult to work out which cut means what. The cuts simply for the subway, I reinstated immediately. Cuts made to save voice strain did not apply here – they went back in. In 1935 “The Buzzard Song” was cut, because it was considered too much for the singer. John Mauceri leaves it out of his “authentic” Broadway recording, but it is the turning-point of the opera. In my recording, it had to be there. The only cuts to question were the ones for dramatic concision – and that I tried to get right.’

Despite Harnoncourt’s obvious – and understandable – disdain for the gerrymandering of Porgy and Bess into the musical it was never meant to be, the actual musicals Gershwin wrote during the 1920s – like Lady Be Good, Strike Up the Band and Funny Face – were epoch-moulding models of their kind, containing songs like ‘’S Wonderful’, ‘Fascinating rhythm’ and ‘The man I love’ that, for many, define popular song. How does Harnoncourt think Gershwin broadened and refined the language of his musicals to create an opera? ‘The boundary between so-called light music and serious music was not so defined as it is today,’ he responds. ‘It would be impossible to make a musical out of Wozzeck but, actually, quite easy to make one from The Marriage of Figaro.’

I comment that as a pleasing narrative entity, Porgy and Bess is infinitely more satisfying than the cut-and-paste episodes of Rhapsody in Blue, and An American in Paris even. This solicits a response I was not expecting: ‘Absolutely. I made a sketch of all Porgy’s themes and motifs which Igave to the orchestral musicians. This made the rehearsals much easier because they could see how the melodies are connected. It is not leitmotif in the way of Wagner. It is much more subtle.’

More subtle than Wagner, eh? ‘Much. In Wagner, leitmotif is used to label characters. In Porgy and Bess the people are more complicated. Porgy is a good person who kills. Bess is a very complex personality. This is high psychological drama and Gershwin’s motifs are like a
box with limitless content – one meaning transforms into another. I wouldn’t even call them leitmotifs.’ With time starting to run short – but no pressure from Harnoncourt to finish – I’m anxious to gauge what he thinks about Gershwin’s contemporaries. Duke Ellington, for instance. Oh yes and, Nikolaus, what is your concept of swing, then? ‘I listened to Ellington intensely at one time, less now,’ he recalls. ‘In Germany after the war, every music that was rhythmically fancy was called jazz. But we soon found out that there is excellent music – like Ellington’s – which earns the name jazz, and then commercial junk which isn’t jazz. When our period instrument group Concentus Musicus Wien played in New Orleans, we asked where the best place is to hear jazz. We went to a club where a magnificent traditional jazz band was playing. They somehow smelt we were musicians, and our harpsichordist, violins and woodwinds joined in. It was a fantastic session.

‘But when conducting Porgy, I didn’t have to learn to swing. It’s part of my personality. When I was playing cello under George Szell, I could have killed him because he was so rhythmically rigid! To me this was non-music. I was told from the start of my cello studies that my way of playing was too swinging. I always changed a little bit the value of the notes. But this is the nature of where musical reality takes you – in 16 semiquavers every one is a little different, because each harmony, too, has its length.’ In 1955 Charles Mingus wrote to Downbeat magazine defending Dave Brubeck from a Miles Davis ear-bashing about his (Brubeck’s) alleged inability to swing. ‘No matter how much they try to say Brubeck doesn’t swing, it’s factually unimportant,’ Mingus wrote. ‘Dave honestly thinks he’s swinging. He feels and plays a certain pulse which gives him pleasure and a sense of exaltation, because he’s sincerely doing something the way he, Dave Brubeck, feels like doing it.’ Anyone approaching Harnoncourt’s Porgy anticipating the ballsy, instinctive big-band swing of Maazel’s Cleveland Orchestra will be disappointed. But think Mingus – every note of Harnoncourt’s recording is sincere and played with authentic exaltation, in deep reverence for Gershwin’s achievement.

Further questioning about jazz reveals that the Harnoncourts were good friends with Friedrich Gulda, in Austria nicknamed ‘the terrorist pianist’ because of his knack of cutting across jazz and classical orthodoxies. Harnoncourt tells me that he met Joe Zawinul – the Austrian keyboard-player/composer, former Miles Davis sideman and founder of jazz-rock supergroup Weather Report – through Gulda, and once performed Mozart’s double piano concerto with Gulda and Chick Corea, another Miles alumnus. ‘I had the impression of hearing the young Schumann when I heard Chick improvise,’ Harnoncourt reflects. 

Harnoncourt has restored one bona fide slice of improvised action to Porgy – the ‘Noise Symphony’ that begins scene 3 of the last act – which Gershwin originally intended the percussion-players to improvise but later replaced with a Morning Overture. But why did the once worthy tradition of improvisation in Western classical music disappear? ‘This is an enormous problem for me,’ Harnoncourt answers. ‘Where it is really part of the composition, where the composer expects improvisation, it is a fake if the musician improvises in style. When I perform Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, every violinist plays the cadenza by Joachim or Kreisler. This is nonsense. The cadenza must be improvised; or composed by the soloist; or, perhaps, by someone they know. A few months ago I performed Haydn’s C major Cello Concerto with Clemens Hagen and he played a new cadenza by Georg Friedrich Haas – it has quarter-tones and all kinds of extended cello techniques. It was authentic. This, for me, is one of the good possibilities.’

With the interview over, a final pleasure. I’ve been charged with presenting Harnoncourt with the 2009 Gramophone Lifetime Achievement Award that, in October, he was too ill to accept in person. He is delighted. ‘The lifetime isn’t over yet,’ he exclaims, ‘but when my times comes, I’d be very happy if the last music I could hear was the final song from Porgy, “Oh Lawd, I’m on my way”.’ His achievements surely aren’t over either – an 85th birthday Wozzeck, anyone?

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