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The Wand Syndrome

David Hurwitz

I have before me a disc issued on Japanese RCA Red Seal containing live performances of Schubert’s “Unfinished” and Bruckner’s Ninth Symphonies taken from Tokyo concerts in November, 2000. Günter Wand leads his own NDR Symphony Orchestra. The performances are staggering, as they usually are when this particular podium master takes on this particular repertoire. Indeed, there is no finer conductor of the German “standards” alive today. What a pity then that the discs may be, for all intents and purposes, impossible to sell. This is Wand’s fifth recording of Bruckner’s Ninth, his fourth of Schubert’s Eighth. Unlike some conductors, whose interpretations change radically over time, his have remained remarkably consistent, not even slowing down noticeably as he approaches his 90th birthday. By any standards they represent a remarkable musical achievement. So why don’t they matter?

In a sense, Wand’s situation mirrors in microcosm that of the industry as a whole. We are swamped, not in a sinkhole of mediocrity, but in a surfeit of excellence. It’s all well and good to complain about the major labels’ alleged lack of commitment to classical music, but even given the turmoil in today’s market, the facts prove otherwise. Wand has been permitted to record his core repertoire to the point of absurdity. Five Bruckner Ninths in roughly two decades? Four Schubert Eighths? I’ve taken BMG to task for deleting these recordings almost faster than Wand can make them, and for failing to distribute them internationally, but then I ask myself: What are they to do? How should they promote an artist whose misfortune has been to live longer than he ever could have expected, enjoying excellent health and undiminished mastery in his chosen field, and who seems to have no grasp at all of what makes good marketing sense?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not criticizing Wand either. He’s an enormously serious, self-critical artist who understands that there’s no such thing as a “perfect” performance, and who doubtless feels that each new recording improves on previous efforts. And if BMG wants to document his every move, believing that this is profitable, who is he to argue? Still, it’s almost as if, in a bizarre twist on the “Flying Dutchman” story, Wand has been cursed to re-record Bruckner’s Ninth every two or three years throughout eternity, with BMG haplessly obligated to issue the discs. How many normal people want to hear five recordings of the same symphony by the same conductor? You simply cannot expect BMG (or anyone else for that matter) to have figured out how to market this stuff, even if they have answered the question of why the consumer should prefer Wand in the first place to the likes of Jochum, Giulini, Skrowaczewski, Bernstein, Tintner, Dohnanyi, or Karajan, to name only a few. CDs are not toasters, after all. They don’t come with built-in obsolescence.

The case of Günter Wand proves one of the fundamental tenets of economics: value is a function of scarcity. I well remember how eagerly sought-after and anticipated Wand’s original WDR recordings for Deutsche Harmonia Mundi were back in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Here was a self-described “old conductor of the new school”, devoting what everyone then thought were his last years to the music he loved best, and turning in one magnificent performance after another. Who could have guessed that 20-odd years later he’d still be doing it, in a strange sense a victim of his own proven standard of excellence, of the boring ubiquity of greatness? Wand’s history also demonstrates another, far more controversial fact: in terms of their cultural significance, most recordings, good or not, simply don’t matter. They remain fundamentally what they always have been: a source of cheap entertainment.

A few months ago, Harmonia Mundi’s founder Bernard Coutaz issued an eloquently worded appeal for recordings to be recognized and preserved as cultural monuments, like for instance the Mona Lisa or the Parthenon. It’s an appealing thought, except for one problem: he’s wrong. Recordings have little inherent cultural significance at all; this quality resides primarily in the work of art itself, as defined by the score (in the widest sense, including the body of scholarship and performance parameters that govern correct interpretation). A performance is simply a snapshot, a single fleeting perspective, on the work in question. A recording is one step further removed — a snapshot of the snapshot. Where does the cultural value actually reside: in the Parthenon, or in the postcard of the Parthenon that you buy in the Athens airport?

The market for recordings, then, is essentially a market for postcards, or to be more charitable, fine art reproductions. Günter Wand doubtless would agree, for nothing else accounts for his willingness to dismiss his early recordings every few years in favor of his latest thoughts. Or let’s take M. Coutaz’s perspective to its logical extreme and agree to a rendez-vous in the year 3475 at the gift shop in the Prague Museum of the New World Symphony. It’s two doors down from the Museum of Smetana’s Ma Vlast, and right across the square from the Museum of Janácèk’s Sinfonietta. The Museum of Martinu’s Symphony No. 4 is under construction and scheduled to open shortly. The NWS museum (as it’s called for short) contains 1,739,952 (at last count) recordings of Dvorák’s masterpiece, each a unique cultural monument lovingly preserved at the taxpayer’s expense. Your job: listen to them all and tell me exactly how they differ from one another, what each and every interpretive variable says about the cultural context in which it first occurred, and why these differences matter to us today, in the year 3475.

The desire to inflate or otherwise overstate the value of recordings (aside from those of music entirely new to disc) fundamentally belongs to a philosophy that elevates the work of the performer over that of the composer, often but not always in conjunction with a form of decadent nostalgia that revels morosely in the purported decline of contemporary standards in interpretation. This last, of course, is not M. Coutaz’s view, since he’s engaged in the ongoing production of cultural monuments–er, new recordings. Still, it’s strange that those who so brazenly assert the unique, irreplaceable value of individual performances have so little understanding of the basic fact that the more successful a culture is in producing great performances of the same works, the less significant or valuable overall each new version must necessarily be.

It is, in fact, a corollary to our definition of classical music as “works that reward a theoretically infinite number of repetitions over time,” that no single performance is more essential or fundamental to a work’s survival or reputation than any other. The prerequisite for a great performance is great music. Great works of art are hardy little suckers. They survive all kinds of vicissitudes in performance, emerging with their sterling qualities intact and still remain communicative. But a great performance of a piece of garbage is still garbage. As long as we have great music, then, we’ll never lack for exceptional interpretations, both live and on disc. The more pressing issue for us today is this: What do we do with all of those great recordings? How do we make sense of the artistic bonanza facing us now, one that can only become even more profligate as time goes on? From the record company’s point of view the issue is similar, but phrased differently: What is this stuff really worth, and how do we sell it?

Recorded music is not different from any other commodity. It obeys the same economic rules. Excessive supply must lead to falling prices, but not necessarily, as has been the case in the classical music market, to the expectation on the part of consumers that cheap discs entail no loss of artistic or sonic quality. This is what the industry has delivered–ironically at its own peril — to the public, thank you very much. The solution, with all due respect to M. Coutaz, is not a public program for the preservation of recordings. What Günter Wand’s example demonstrates above all is this: We have reached a point beyond even that which affords us the luxury of choice. We are drowning in greatness. If 90% of the recordings of any major composer vanished overnight, it would hardly matter. Plenty of great performances would remain, and more would be on the way. Specifically, Maestro Wand might just have a legitimate reason to take one last swing at Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony. And just maybe, we’d find the prospect as appealing as we did two decades ago.

David Hurwitz

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