Evviva la Nilsson/Birgit for ever

'Two roles - two worlds,' announces this spread in a programme for one of Birgit Nilsson's local events in Båstad on the Bjäre Peninsula, southwest Sweden, which I was so lucky to visit this summer for the Birgit Nilsson Days. On my return, I eagerly read, finally, from cover to cover La Nilsson - My Life in Music the autobiography translated into English, and handsomely republished (though with rather too many typos) by Verlag für moderne Kunst,Vienna.

Part of Birgit's abundant legacy - I'll call her that, as do the good museum folk of her family home, since I feel in an odd way I know her, and not as some ossified legend - to have allowed music lovers like me to experience her roots in the mostly happy, if physically tough, farm work which grounded her for life. And as she tells her story, there is no personality split, despite the superhuman talent she had as one of the greatest singers of the 20th century (no need even to qualify that with 'one of the greatest Wagner and Strauss singers' - I've been listening to her recently in Scandinavian song, and she's consummate there too). 

The second chapter, 'When the little one came into the world,' gives as beguiling an account of a rural childhood as Carl Nielsen's, though Birgit's circumstances were far from poor, and she was an only child, rather than one of 12 (the Danish composer's situation) or nine (the case with her father Nils). Most folk I met around the locale were delightful, natural and very down to earth. This is the farmstead where Birgit spent the first year of her life before moving to the ensemble now housing the museum.

The first of our walking expeditions - see the Hovs Hallar blog entry for the second - was an admirably signposted trail in the footsteps, or more often the bike tracks, of young Birgit.

Ingrid, aforementioned in that previous entry, was our guide, but I very much liked the way you could (if you had a sophisticated phone, which I certainly don't) access carefully chosen music sung by oour versatile heroine at various stopping posts. The most charming was in front of a hillock where young Birgit joined her friends in al fresco dancing - a polka and a folksong were the choices. They put a spring in our step as we walked on.

The route led along minor roads and farm tracks through gently undulating landscapes with distant views of the sea and the Danish-style church at Hov

and eventually to the bigger edifice at Västra Karup where Birgit's formative choral training took place, and where all this year's concerts of the Birgit Nilsson Days took place.

The diva always returned to give concerts to the locals

and also to visit her parents' grave. Relations with her father were not always easy - though he bought her a house organ when she was a young girl, the idea that the natural heir to the farm, who should marry a strong man and settle there, wanted to go on to study singing  was abhorrent. He gave her not a penny for her studies in Stockholm, but fortunately her mother had some money of her own. In the house-museum, we heard a recording of Stina Nilsson singing, made at the fair in Gothenburg - not just a natural voice, but also a professional-sounding one, very lovely. Lucky how posterity preserved that. In later years, Nils inevitably became very proud of his world-famous daughter.

So this was always the spot, right by the church - no special privileges for La Nilsson, who also chose to be buried there (much to Vienna's disappointment) alongside her beloved husband of 55 years, Bertil Niklasson. Though she refers to him throughout the autobiography, Birgit leaves their story until the last and, by implication, the most important chapter. The down-to-earth portrait of a marriage, not sparing of either her or Bertil's faults, is as much of a gem as any of the other highlights in the book. Forgive me if I don't show the full inscriptions which place them both equally on the plot in front of the parents' headstone (she gets the picture, though).

It's not my intention to follow the extraordinary Nilsson story through, and there are way too many fascinating insights in the autobiography to quote (not least on how the singing voice ought to work). One thing especially struck me, though: how artists at the highest level can be professional when it comes to themselves, but totally the opposite in often abysmal attitudes to their fellow musicians. The account of lessons at Stockholm's Royal Academy of Music with Scottish one-time famous tenor Joseph Hislop is a case in point of a teacher nearly wrecking a young voice, applying deadly pressure to the vocal chords, and dealing out devastating snobbery ('Birgit should be aware that it is not really possible for a farm girl to become a singer'). This photo of Birgit around that time shows she was not one to be deterred, though the effect was temporarily devastating.

Simply gobsmacking, and often very funny to us, though clearly not to the unfortunates under his baton, is the behavious of Herbert von Karajan as reported here. Quite often, I'm told, conductors ask for pianissimos from their singers in rehearsals, and then conduct mezzo forte in performance because they can't help it. Karajan, Nilsson observes, went for loud in performance quite deliberately, having asked for the same quiet dynamics from singers earlier. And the performers would often be kept waiting for up to 45 minutes in morning rehearsals, only to be told that the 'Maestro' was held up - they had to come back in the evenings. 

In Vienna and New York, we read, Karajan fancied himself an expert in lighting his own Wagner productions (in this sphere he was absolutely an amateur). The Vienna Philharmonic was more than a little piqued that Karajan had granted it two rehearsals compared to 80 for the lighting. 'The technical personnel...decided, in their own charming, Viennese way to teach him a lesson in giving him a laurel wreath to celebrate the 75th lighting rehearsal'. Can you imagine how ludicrous the vain creature looked, raised up with a light shining on him (the lucky one), baton in one hand, telephone to give lighting cues in the other? 

This splendid piece of satirical wear, a miner's helmet with red light for a Brünnhilde groping in the dark, now on display among the items on Nilsson's dressing table and mirror in the museum, was sent to Nilsson on the evening of her Walküre premiere at the Met. Karajan wanted to know the sender but never found out. We learn from the afterword to the new edition of La Nilsson that the writer, high-up Met secretary Peggy Tueller who became great friends with Birgit, was the culprit. The Valkyrie duly modelled it in her dressing room (though I don't think she went on stage in it during a rehearsal with Karajan, as has also been asserted).

As I wrote in the piece for The Arts Desk, I've never laughed more going round a museum: Nilsson had a wonderful sense of humour to counter all the weird flummery of the opera world. I wonder what she thought of all these dolls, sent by one fan, though she became firm friends with the lady and godmother to her son.

Warm and honest with genuine fans, Nilsson recalls the less funny side in her autobiography: a long and terrifying story of a glamorous stalker which might make a good subject for a film, a play or even an opera. I'll leave you to read about that.

Anyway, her reading was eclectic - or maybe she just displayed the books given to her in the farmhouse which became a summer home. Did she ever learn any of The World's Best Dirty Jokes?

While you're free to wander at will through the museum, in the converted cow barn, the house can be seen by guided tour. Our young guide Klara, a perfect English speaker with real flair in delivery giving her first tour in the language, couldn't have been nicer, and in that she was no different from all the staff who work at the museum. That's a portrait of Nils on the wall, by the way, next to some traditional Swedish furniture and fabrics.

Just a few more shots from the farmhouse: the kitchen

which also has a copy of the Met Cookbook open at the page of Birgit's recipe for gravad lax; two of her cakes are also available from the excellent cafe (where the pigs used to be kept, appropriatedly enough); and a view of the piano surmounted by photos - I love the treated one, top row left, of a Stockholm debut as Agathe.

So thankful that the house organ given by dad to talented young daughter is on display in the pastor's house at the Boarp Museum of Local History above Båstad,

because otherwise we might not have discovered this delightful open-air collection of buildings or been treated to a very special tea in a cosy back room of the wooden building in which refreshments are served. My gorgeous friend Pia was doing up a house only fifteen minutes up the coast by train , and she joined us for the afternoon. I love this pic of her pouring coffee while the splendid lady who spoiled us stands in the background.

I need to return to Båstad for a blog entry about the supremely beautiful church there, another local venue for Birgit of Bjärehalvön. A final word on the autobiography: it's so mich more than a series of anecdotes. And while our incorruptible heroine does not spare the timewasters and troublemakers of the operatic world, she is infallibly generous about the majority of her colleagues (even Karajan is granted the ability, when he feels like it, to pull something absolutely sensational out of his oversized hat). And, I'm sure, absolutely truthful.

By way of coda, since we haven't seen much of Birgit in the roles for which she was most celebrated, see how different she could look on stage according to costume and make-up. The cover of the Decca Salome - although I have it on CD, I couldn't resist picking up the LP box set in a charity shop the other week - has always been a hoot, an audition before its time for RuPaul's Drag Race

but then look at my favourite glamour shot of our heroine in the same role. Very Emma Peel as played by Diana Rigg in The Avengers, don't you think?

The museum sells postcards and even spectacle cloths with this on. Needless to say, I bought four.

Silver foxes

By and large, I'd rather hear the first two - Finnish conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Swedish trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger (photographed by Marco Borggreve), whom I encountered together in a stupendous BBC Symphony Orchestra concert a couple of weeks ago - than the third, were he still alive. Whatever his good qualities, Herbert von Karajan was vain, tyrannical, egotistical and a control freak. I lost most respect for him when I saw that in all his carefully calculated films he has his eyes shut. The point is pithily made in the excellent 'Great Conductors of the Past' DVD where we move from the ocular knife-twists of Fritz Reiner to the narcissist Karajan and then on to the wonderful, eyes-wide-open George Szell. What an insult, said spirited BBCSO trumpeter Martin Hurrell when we brought this up in one of our BBC Symphony Orchestra class - 'I'd shut my eyes back, and what would he say to that?'

Well, many musicians lost their jobs for much less. John Bridcut's superb documentary screened on BBC Four brings a reality check to the Karajan myth. Yet weirdly I did shed a tear or two in the narrative of his death. It's a Greek tragedy, really, a saga of hubris finally brought low when the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra who had put up with his arrogance and personal disregard for so many decades turned against him. He went out hand in hand with the Vienna Philharmonic, who hadn't experienced the worst excesses, but still, just as nearly all politicians end their career in failure, so this musical operator who strove for godhood turned out only to be a man after all.

There are plenty of testimonies in the documentary to the special magic, and one contributor wondered whether collegial work with a conductor could ever reach the same heights as inflexible autocracy - to which the answer can be given with a one-word example to the contrary - Abbado. By the way, do get hold of the Lucerne memorial concert in his honour just released on Accentus. I wrote the notes, and a couple of days ago ten copies arrived in the post - most of them quickly earmarked as special seasonal gifts. Though the opening movement from Schubert's 'Unfinished' Symphony is played to an empty podium, Andris Nelsons pops up as a natural and again - unlike Karajan - a considerate successor.

I came to feel that most Karajan performances were more about him than the music - the glossy sound was applied indiscriminately, great when it worked, inappropriate when not. Oddly, I liked his Italian opera the best, above all his recordings of Don Carlo, La bohème, Madam Butterfly and Tosca (surprisingly, more the second one with Ricciarelli and Carreras - did ever an operatic love duet sound more swooningly sensuous than this Act One number). There were some luminous sounds in his later CDs; the documentary reminds us of the special way he lit the sunset epilogue of Strauss's Eine Alpensinfonie

I wish I'd seen him live. I stood outside the Festival Hall before his last London concert - Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht and Brahms's First Symphony - and was about to buy a ticket for £40 off a tout, only to hear a loudspeaker message to the effect that fake tickets were being sold, so I backed off.

The best antidote to the extremes of autocracy in the documentary comes from the humour of the players, above all James Galway, whose beard annoyed Karajan when he was a Berlin Phil principal, and so the 'maestro' replaced him on the post-soundtrack film with a colleague.

Bald players were given wigs; the audience was made up of cardboard cutouts. Most of the shots were from the four cameras trained on Karajan; usually the orchestra just appeared as the instruments, not the players (as in the case of the flautist who did appear; only his fingers were seen).

Did Karajan have friends? Not that anyone knew. Did anyone in the orchestra love him? No - there was respect, but not love. I won't go into further details: just watch and be charmed by the contributors, especially Galway, Anne-Sophie Mutter and Jessye Norman.

Now, thank goodness, it has to be about friendly collaboration. If you're a natural master, like Abbado, you just make the players think it's coming entirely from them. Among the best now, I rate Jukka-Pekka alongside Vladimir Jurowski as the conductor with the most supremely elegant and yet economical technique, the dour exterior concealing huge feeling.

I remember being hugely impressed by his comment about Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony, which he conducted some years back at the Barbican, that there was so much pain in it that he found it almost unbearable.

There's certainly unbearable tension in the subcutaneous horrors of the Third, its material taken mostly hook line and sinker with unchanged orchestration from the world of the infernal opera The Fiery Angel. What most amazed me at the concert the other week was the sound Saraste brings with him - silvery-steely, so apt for this work as it was last season for Shostakovich's Fourth. There's a spring-heeled quality, perfect rhythmic definition, avoiding portentousness but never lightweight.

I'll bet Brett Dean was impressed by the orchestral maneouvres in his Dramatis personae, inspired by Hardenberger, the trumpeter who gave the premiere and the performance we heard. With the rhythmic underpinning superbly negotiated by Saraste with characteristic clarity, this came across as the most impressive work of Dean's I've heard yet: some leave me cold, but there was an element of theatre here - as, we agreed in our pre-performance chat, there is to a degree in all music - which stopped it ever being mere mood-music.

Writing for a personality makes such a difference: several of the contemporary concert works I've enjoyed most over the past decades have been concertos: Widmann's ad absurdam for Sergei Nakariakov, Magnus Lindberg's Clarinet Concerto for Kari Kriikku, now this. Of course there's entertainment value in the Ivesian meeting of marching-band music and a thornier idiom towards the end, inspired by a scene from Chaplin's Modern Times, but the instrumental ideas are always fresh and haunting. And I want to hear it again soon - which should be possible when it's finally broadcast (I thought it went out live on 5 December, but that slot was taken by a BBC Philharmonic concert, so it must be scheduled some time soon)..

Meanwhile, unmissable on the Radio 3 iPlayer for the next three weeks, is the recording of the last and, for me, the most astounding orchestral concert of the year,  Sakari Oramo's championship of Rachmaninov's Spring, Nielsen's Second Symphony and Busoni's Piano Concerto with one of the few soloists able to master it, Garrick Ohlsson.

I'd taken the students through 'The Four Temperaments' the previous evening, and we came out on a high, as we did at the concert's interval, but to my amazement the Busoni trumped even that, if only because it's like nothing I've ever heard, and like most folk there I'd never heard it live. I try to articulate my confused thoughts about it in my Arts Desk review.

As a coda to the year, though, and to the first concert, nothing could have been more spellbinding than Saraste's encore to mark Finnish Independence Day and the impending Sibelius celebrations, the magical 'Scene with Cranes' adapted from the incidental music to Kuolema. What could be spookier than the introduction of two clarinets to the string textures for the sound of the accompanying birds? Here it is as a wintry epilogue, albeit not in Saraste's audience-stilling performance. Leif Segerstam was always going to be slower, but he's still a master.