The Symphony: A Listener's Guide

Good book

This is the first of three collections of reworked and expanded program notes that annotator Michael Steinberg wrote for the Boston and San Francisco Symphony Orchestras in the 1970s and '80s. It's quite an entertaining and informative guide to the standard symphonic repertoire.Steinberg has the rare talent of writing about music in prose as precise and informed as it is imaginative and informal. He opens our ears to music that so often passes as background noise that we've nearly forgotten how to listen to it. Here, for example, is a stunning passage about the slow movement of Haydn's Symphony no. 102 in B flat:"For the Adagio, Haydn borrows a movement from the Piano Trio in F-sharp minor he had written earlier that year...The actual sound of the movement is the most remarkable that Haydn ever imagined. Trumpets and drums are muted, a solo cello injects its gently penetrating timbre into the middle of the texture, and just before the end, the two trumpets in their lowest register contribute a sound so extraordinary (literally) that it still tends to frighten conductors, many of whom remove it."A lifetime's worth of listening, learning, and writing have been distilled into this book, and gems of observation are on nearly every page. Try Steinberg on the question of Nowak vs. Haas in the slow movement of the Bruckner Eighth: "I am talking about thirty-five seconds of music, but the difference is stunning." Then there's the question of "composer approved" cuts in the Rachmaninov Second: "Some of the standard deletions consist of petty impatiences like reducing the four measures of accompaniment at the start of the first Allegro to two, but they have also entailed such brutal surgery as the removal of the entire principal theme from the recapitulation of the Adagio. Cuts do not solve formal problems: they merely shorten the time you have to spend dealing with them."We also learn of Schumann's homage to Bach in the Second Symphony, and of how much Mahler learned from Schumann's example; of the surprising parallels between Beethoven's rollicking Eighth Symphony and his "Serioso" opus 95 string quartet; and on the seemingly intractable second movement of the Sibelius Third: "Not only can you yourself reverse your hearing of the melody much as you can make the tick-tock of a clock change step, but Sibelius also calls in the basses ever so softly to contradict the flutes and clarinets or the violins in their rhythmic reading. And those basses, though they hardly ever rise above mezzo-forte, want very much to be heard."Steinberg tells an irresistable anecdote of how Leonard Bernstein, having read one of his program notes for the first time, accosted him at Tanglewood, saying "You -- you have always been such a bitch to me, but now it turns out you love music." Steinberg certainly does, and that love is evident on each page of this book.