Symphonic music on screen: Beethoven's Fifth Symphony

Gaia Varon, University of Bologna, Dept. of Music and Performing Arts

Background

Nowadays, it is common practice to “watch” symphonic music on a screen. DVDs, Music TV Channels, old videos found online, concerts in live streaming, have become part of the daily life of music lovers. New videos are produced every year, and watching older ones becomes easier and easier. All these videos are gradually summing and building up a specific portion of music repertoire, and thus of our music knowledge. 

When studying the history of performance, whether musicians or scholars, we are confronted with different kinds of sources, among which audio and video recordings have a prominent position. A close examination of the recordings as artifacts becomes appropriate when using them as sources. What is the nature of a classical music video? what kind of relations does it establish with the score, and with the performance it displays? how faithful a document is it of the performers' choices? how much information can we gather about the social history of performance? what is the impact of the choices of the filming and recording crews in the music video? or, in other words, whose story does the film tell? In this paper I will present some results of a wider, ongoing research, aimed at outlining and analyzing the structural mechanics of the screen version of a performance, particularly the relationship between the screen version and the score, and the relationship between the screen version and the performance.

The research takes a few assumptions as starting points: first, that filming music implies a specific authorship – comprising all the individual contributions of the team components. Second, that the screen version of a performance can be looked upon as a new, specific object, in which three different layers of authorship coexist: composition, performance, screen production. I call the level of screen production, the “third authorship”, and I assume that analyzing the third authorship layer is possible, legitimate and interesting; and, particularly, that through a thorough analysis of the screen version it is possible to outline the ideal intention of the third authorship, which I call “overscore”. Finally, I assume that the overscore can be considered as a text, and thus be investigated in comparison with the underlying two layers – composition and performance – and with the appliance of some of the methods currently used in investigations about text (score) and performance. 

TOSCANINI

Let us start by examining an excerpt from the recording of the NBC telecast of Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra, on March 22, 1952. [1] It was directed by Kirk Browning, then very young, and later one of the most prolific and well-known TV directors. The concert began with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The film makes us partake of the whole rite of the concert; we see the conductor coming in and walking his way to the podium while we hear the applause of the audience. Toscanini then turns around and the film cuts to this image: 

Figure 1.

It is worth scrutinizing this image closely. Black and white. Obviously. It is not a stylistic feature. In 1952, cinema had color long since, but the newborn television was black and white. For contemporary audience, black and white is not something they would notice. For us today, it is an immediate gauge of the time line: this is “old”.

Toscanini fills the space. He is the space, all that we see. Black and white are more important than any possible shade in between: Toscanini dresses in black, with a simple, tight jacket all tied up, each button secured up to the stiff collar, from which the subtle bright white line of the shirt collar springs out. Everything else is dark, except Toscanini's face and hands. Light comes in from the left side of the screen, on Toscanini's right side. It is a direct, bright and brightening light and it increases the contrast between Toscanini and everything else, or better, between Toscanini's hands and face, and everything else. One really needs to choose to see something of what lies behind Toscanini in the screen shot: one could then detect the many heads of the audience. But it is only a vague background, presumably not meant to be noticed. The man and the image are noticeably serious. Sternness seems to be a main feature of both the man and the Figure. Toscanini’s eyes are piercingly dark in his lit face, against the shining white hair. He does not smile, does not throw a friendly or encouraging look at the orchestra. Stern and gimlet-eyed, he simply looks at them gravely, his hands lifted, ready to give the cue. 

This image is brought in in what we can properly call the first shot of the concert, and the camera keeps it for what is quite a long time for television’s standards, i.e. forty-eight seconds. The same image with only little variants comes back again and again through the whole telecast, and every time it is kept for some time. For our standards, the film is very sober and static, but still very absorbing because of its severity. It is not only an after-effect: this sternness seems to be the key of the whole film and it has been very carefully pursued, as we will see.

Let us briefly go through some pictures of the other shots used in the first movement of the Symphony. If we put them in a line, we can perceive how the images themselves tell a “story”, from Toscanini to his orchestra, and back. After the image discussed above, we are presented with Toscanini emerging from its very element, the orchestra; one more back step and we see the whole sound machine.

Figure 1b.	Figure 2.	Figure 3.

Passing by another shot with Toscanini and the string players, we go back to the image of Toscanini alone for the last three shots of the movement.

Figure 4.	Figure 5.	Figure 6.	Figure 7.

Toscanini is there all the time. This is not a necessity, it is a choice. If we take a quick look at the first concert directed by Kirk Browning a few months earlier (November 1951), we can see how things went differently. The telecast begins in fact with a shot of Toscanini, but this lasts only twelve seconds (Figure 8); a cut then brings in a view of the left side of the orchestra (Figure 9), but right away the camera pans to the opposite side; this movement takes about twenty seconds. A shot of Toscanini and the violins follows, which lasts for fifteen seconds (Figure 10), and then another shot shows the double basses for seven seconds (Figure 11): 

Figure 8.	Figure 9.	Figure 10.	Figure 11.

The camera then pans to the left, until we are brought back to the image of the left side of the orchestra, which is now kept on screen for seven seconds after which the camera pans again, now to the right (Figures 12 and 13); another film cut and we see the timpani, but only for a brief moment: as soon as they start playing, the camera pans again (Figures 14 and 15).

Figure 12.	Figure 13.	Figure 14.	Figure 15.

All this happens in a little less than one and a half minute. In the Fifth Symphony film, the first one and a half minute is far more static: more than half of that time is taken up by the image of Toscanini alone (see Figure 1) and the rest of it by Toscanini among the string players (see Figure 2). Quite obviously something happened in between the two concerts. In the Fifth Symphony film Browning has a precise strategy, radically different from that of the previous telecast. We can focus on just one detail to grasp the essence of it. In all the previous nine television concerts of Toscanini and the NBC Symphony, Toscanini is elegantly dressed.

Figure 16.	Figure 17.

But if we go back to the first image of the Fifth Symphony film, we may notice that his attire is very different: here he wears the tunic he used to wear during rehearsals (it seems it was Browning who asked Toscanini to wear it). This image has been compared to a Rembrandt painting, because of its darkness and of the white element standing out of it. But there is also something religious: Toscanini is represented here as a minister of cult. In this Figure a whole conception of music, and of a contemplative, absorbing way of listening is implied.

KARAJAN

It is interesting to make a comparison. There are four different films of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony conducted by Herbert von Karajan, with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. [2]

The first is the incomplete recording of a telecast of Japan's television during Karajan's and the Berlin's tour in Japan in 1957. It is a good example of what I have called the “standardized approach”, an approach that aims at a good balance between all the ingredients, that is, images of the conductor, of the orchestra, and some details of individual instruments. The details have a very clear, sort of “didactic” function: they bring the spectator's attention to a specific sound element by showing its source. Such “informative” details are a basic feature of the standardized approach, and the detail of the horns at the beginning of the second theme of the first movement, as well as that of the timpani a little later, can be found in most films of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

Figure 18.	Figure 19.	Figure 20.	Figure 21.

The second version is far more interesting. After the tour in Japan, Karajan understood very quickly that television was going to become very important for classical music and musicians, and he wanted to have his word in it. For several years, he made experiments with different directors, and eventually ended up directing himself his own music films.

One of the most interesting experiments took place in the late Sixties, when Karajan worked with a French film director, Henri Georges Clouzot. Clouzot was then a very well known author of films of the so called “noir” genre, but he had also shot an extraordinary documentary feature called Le mystère Picasso. Karajan had seen the film and got Clouzot involved in a project for a TV series, which was only partially produced. The Fifth Symphony film was part of this project and was produced in 1966. [3] The strategy is very different from Browning's. Karajan and Clouzot opted for a studio production and they aimed at creating a unique aesthetic object, complete in itself. What Karajan wanted to convey to the audience was the “Art of conducting” (which was the name of the series). He and Clouzot created a specific setting, in which conductor and players are placed in an unusual way.

Figure 22.

Black and white here is partly a choice, a stylistic feature. A strong contrast of black and white was a central element of Clouzot filmic style. The set and the shooting converge in conveying the sense of a great sound machine, with the conductor as its engine. Here also the sequence of the shots tells its own story about the concert space and about the relationship between the conductor and the orchestra, but there is yet another story told by the film. And again, we can focus on one detail to grasp the essence. During the first minute and a half of the film, there are four shots; first, we are presented with Karajan alone giving the starting cue (Figure 23, six seconds), and then with the conductor at the center of the whole sound machine (Figure 24, thirty-three seconds); when the second theme comes in, we see again Karajan among the players, now shot from the left side in a somewhat “warmer” image (Figure 25, fifteen seconds). The same image is then taken closer in the following shot (Figure 26), and kept for nine seconds, after which the camera starts zooming out until finally it gets back to the previous shot.

Figure 23.	Figure 24.	Figure 25.	Figure 26.

 

Then something happens which is unexpected: the repetition of the exposition starts with a shot totally unusual for a concert telecast.

Figure 27.

During the first minute and a half of the film there are no details; we do not see the horns or the timpani that we saw in the Japan's video and that can be found in most films of the Fifth Symphony. These details were missing in Toscanini's video because they would not serve (and maybe spoil) Browning's purpose of inducing a religious hearing attitude in the audience. In Clouzot’s film the reason for the absence is different: any detail would spoil the effect of the detail of Karajan's hands, the first detail to come in in the film.

And this detail tells a different story: it is not Karajan's story anymore, it is now Clouzot's story. These powerful hands against the strongly contrasted background use specific cinematic features to convey a sense of drama which is closer to Clouzot's films than to the supposed Beethoven conception.

In 1983, Karajan directed his own version of the Fifth Symphony, where eventually his own idea is the key of the video: a great sound machine driven by the conductor, or, a great resonating body at whose heart is the conductor. [4] Karajan is never alone:

Figure 28.	Figure 29.	Figure 30.

but nor the details are. 

Figure 31.	Figure 32.	Figure 33.	Figure 34.

You never really get to see the individual player: either you see him (never her) within a sort of cloud of other players, as if each individual musician, just like each individual sound, reverberates within the whole. Or you see a very close detail of the instrument. 

Figure 35.	Figure 36.

Final considerations

The four examples that we briefly discussed tell four different stories; none of them is simply the story of “Beethoven's Fifth Symphony”, and, probably more important, none simply tells the story of the specific performance it displays. In one way or another, the author of each video has his own story to tell about the specific embodiment of Beethoven's Fifth he is filming, and thus creates a specific embodiment of the embodiment, or, a performance of the performance.

Understanding how a music video is conceived and produced, is, I have come to believe, not only an end - and a pleasure - in itself, but also a useful tool for other perspectives of research in the music field, and not only for theoretical musicology, but for live music making. “Video-listening” to the classical repertoire builds up knowledge and experience in the “video-listener”; what he understands and expects during a live performance is at least partly based upon his “video-listening” experience.

The third authorship is never neutral, but necessarily superimposes its own reading of the piece and the performance. When we watch Toscanini conducting the Fifth Symphony at Carnegie Hall, with the aim of understanding or analyzing Toscanini's style of conducting, it is necessary to be aware that what we are experiencing, is not that particular Toscanini's Fifth Symphony, but a specific reading of that particular Toscanini's Fifth. Some awareness of the relationship between this reading and the score, and between this reading and Toscanini's performance, will help the scholar and the musician more easily to single out the details of the performance in which he is interested.

Notes

1. The recording of all Toscanini’s telecasts have been published by RCA Victor in VHS and are now available also in a dvd series published by NBC/Testament; the telecast of March 22, 1952, is part of Volume Five, SBDVD 1007. The recording of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is also accessible through youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6K_IuBsRM4).
2. Karajan, Berliner Philharmoniker, «Tokyo – 1957», DVD Dynamic 33644, 2010.
3. The recording is published in dvd by Euroarts/Unitel (2072118); it also accessible through youtube  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK4zt1UTjmA&playnext=1&list=PL41CC64E1F449F44A&index=16)
4. Published in dvd by Deutsche Grammophon/Unitel (00440 073 4102); accessible through youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGKY33n9Okg).