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Conductor, Berkeley Symphony Orchestra
In conversation with Kevin Starr , California State Librarian Emeritus
Starr: Bernstein's "Mass" premiered about 1972. I say this because I was one of the first people to hear it. Maestro Bernstein lived upstairs from me and my wife at the Eliot House when he was Norton professor at Harvard for a year. I would hear this magnificent music at three, four, in the morning. Whenever it flagged, we would fortify the maestro with cheesecake; he liked cheesecake. It was a wonderful year, and I always feel a special thrill to have heard that music in its first composition.Speaking of choosing operas, as the future of the Bavarian State Opera, do you anticipate placing a special emphasis on the operas of Richard Strauss?
Nagano: Yes. There are historically three great phases within the Bayerische Staatsoper. The first phase came with a very strong tie to Mozart. Toward the end of his career, when we all know Mozart was unfortunately falling out of favor - it's difficult to believe, but that happened to Mozart - he wrote one of his greatest operas, "Idomeneo." The Bayerische Staatsoper said finally to Mozart, "Come, we'll finance and mount the premiere." That began a very important phase with Mozart tied to the house.
The second phase came with Richard Wagner, who was, at that point, considered a criminal to the state and would be killed if he was caught. He sought refuge throughout all of Germany, including Bavaria. There the Bayerische Staatsoper offered him both an artistic and a political haven and said, "Come. We'll produce your works here." The great "Tannhäuser" was premiered in Munich, and this formed a tremendous tie with Wagner.
The third, as you mentioned, was with Richard Strauss. Strauss was politically a hot figure, because during the Second World War he had what were perceived as unsavory ties with the Nazi party. And even though he was not at all a Nazi sympathizer, he had to fight for the latter part of his mature career accusations of being a sympathizer. Munich offered him a political and an artistic haven and began a long and a very important relationship with Strauss where Strauss was conducting the great operas there. We also did a number of Strauss premieres there at the house. These three composers, Mozart, Wagner and Strauss, have all had very strong musical leadership positions within the tradition and they will remain important building blocks or pillars to the repertoire, including during my time.
Starr: The longevity of Strauss' career, too, is amazing. I don't think there are too many composers that have been - Bach maybe - active for that long.
Nagano: Very much.
Starr: Speaking of being active that long, conductors seem to be long lived. What do you attribute that to? Is that sort of natural selection in evolutionary terms or it that the kinds of people who are conductors tend to have stamina?
Nagano: There are a number of theories, some of which have been written about. One is that it's cardiovascular exercise. You're doing calisthenics up there. And it is true; physically it is tremendous exertion. I put myself on a scale once just to find out what would happen to my weight before and after a performance of "Mahler 7." I lost 2 kilos, which is the equivalent of about 4 lbs., in 90 minutes.
I oftentimes refer to something I learned when I married my wife, Mari. One of the things that she said to me was the Japanese explanation: There's nothing like home cooking. And it's true. We all appreciate really wonderful meals made at home, especially if you have spent any time traveling. The Japanese feel that the reason for this is that we know each other's personal tastes and you get used to the environment. When you cook at home you cook for members of the family, you cook with love, and the love goes into the ingredients, you are ingesting love, and this is really good for your health.
Conductors have the tremendous privilege - and no matter how prima donna we may act, and no matter how much we may whine in public, I think most of my colleagues would agree with me were I to say that it is very much a privileged profession - to spend and devote our entire lives to the performance of music that we love. Yes, there are long hours; I do 14 to 17 hours a day, seven days a week, four weeks a month, 12 months a year. There is no such thing as a vacation if you're a music director or a conductor. But I get to spend every day of the year doing something that I really, really love. This must be good for your health in some way.
Starr: Maestro, music is a continuity, a continuum. Are there other musical traditions that have interested you just on a recreational basis?
Nagano: I grew up in the famous '60s. The various tensions and the movements of the sociological geography were very much like the plates of the earth moving and an earthquake happening. The way that this was communicated or encouraged or inflamed or somehow proclaimed was very much through popular music - so-called protest music or folk music or folk-rock music or the evolution of the San Francisco sound as alternate or completely opposing ways to the establishment, whatever the prevailing thoughts were. It's a bit different role than what we might refer to as popular music today, which takes on a much higher degree of entertainment value. Entertainment's very important too, but during the late 1960s, early 1970s there was also a very strong political tone to a lot of popular music.
I, being rather normal and typical, was influenced by all of this. I was wrestling within myself whether or not to pursue a profession in music or if I should follow my other passion, international relations, and complete a law degree, which I had begun. I was very much interested in history and in diplomatic relationships. At that time, the mid-1970s, I had a feeling that the world was going to shrink and become much more of an intense place to live because of the closeness with which the various cultures would find themselves. I felt that being involved in diplomatic relationships or an ambassadorial-type relationship perhaps I could, on a very small scale, be a participant in change. As it turns out, music became a much more powerful and relevant part of my ability to communicate. So if there was any ambassador work that was done, I tend to do it without words now, through music.
Starr: You certainly didn't leave behind the international dimension of whatever you were going to do. You spurred around this in your answer, Maestro, the relationship between art and politics, or music and politics more precisely. One thinks of the rioting at the premiere of the "Rite of Spring." Is that a political act, or an aesthetic judgment? Are the arts and politics two distinct worlds that have nothing to say to each other, or is there a relationship? Does there have to be a relationship, and if there is, could you elaborate on what it might or should be?
Nagano: Those kinds of questions are exactly the questions that we as performers need to ask. Whether we answer correctly or incorrectly is completely irrelevant, because there is no correct answer. But the exercise of posing the question with the full realization that, like most things in life, art and politics can never be fully separate - it's simply impossible. On the other hand, for an artist and a public who appreciates arts to fully appreciate the content of a work of art, one needs to free ourselves from political thinking. So it's a very complex subject. In a sense it's a paradox that the only way that one can realize the full potency of an artistic statement is to re-ask this question again.
In Berlin, where I received a very intense training in politics, I came on the front firing line of European relationships between politics and arts. There it's a bit different than it is here in America. In the great European countries an enormous amount of public money goes directly into artistic institutions, with the idea being not so much that we have to tax everyone to support the artistic institutions; no, with the idea being that the artistic institutions belong to the people. You own your opera house; it belongs to you so therefore you can go in and you can express yourself. With that enormous amount of public funding there's a tremendous political price to be paid for receiving those public funds, and one has to reckon with this one way or another.
Starr: In terms of a variety of musical traditions, do you see classical music absorbing from the more popular strains, or are there divides between these worlds?
Nagano: As far back as we can remember, the lines between the various genres in music have been blurred. If we think back to the earliest times of recorded music, secular and non-secular music, many times non-secular music would be put into secular music. Folk music would be put into church music. If you think of the works of Gustav Mahler and how he included military songs, marching tunes, folk songs, ethnic life tunes into his Bohemian folks songs, incorporated that into his formal symphonies, we see that composers for many years, if not forever, have suffered the consequences when they dared to incorporate these kinds of songs. Or think of the controversy surrounding Bernstein's "Mass," when he included so-called '60s-like folk songs into a mass. My goodness, it created an uproar within the Roman Catholic Church which was only quelled when the pope came to the defense of Bernstein. So yes, there has always been a tradition of composers being inspired and then injecting this inspiration into their so-called formal compositions. But we also see that it hasn't been always an easy time for the composers who have dared to do this.
Starr: One of the composers, Milhaud, who you've interpreted so extensively, had a special relationship to jazz, didn't he?
Nagano: He did. I always thought Darius Milhaud was a California composer because I grew up in California and Milhaud was at Mills College for years and years as head of the music department. I thought he was just a Californian with a funny name. It was only many, many years later that I became aware of what a tremendous influence he had had on the evolution of French traditional music. Les Six at the beginning of the 20th century was an active and visible protest group - a group of political musicians, including Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc. I had quite a bubble of activity where I was promoting Milhaud's music, but it wasn't just a blanket promotion of his music. I was interested in having the world have a sensitivity for the music that Darius Milhaud wrote while he was at Mills College. I felt these were very productive periods. It was important for me to take back to France this particular pocket of repertoire that Milhaud experienced. He experienced a tremendous amount of inspiration here and wrote a number of works. I wanted to take to France what I regarded as California music, which the French, being the French, regarded as French music. So it was a spicy exchange that we had.
Starr: In all the genres of music and places you conducted, I don't remember seeing ballet. Have you conducted ballets, or is that a special genre, a special way of approaching conducting?
Nagano: I feel like this is a true confession moment, Dr. Starr, but not only have I conducted a lot of ballet, I had the miserable experience of being a ballet accompanist as a conductor. We all have dreams of being able to create music as we hear it in our imaginations. We all take the responsibility of learning a score very seriously from even early ages on. But sometimes we conductors confuse that dedication to the music with dedication to our egos and we go through very egocentric phases.
In my first years as a conductor, I had the wonderful opportunity of exercising these early years with the Oakland Ballet. But part of being the conductor for the Oakland Ballet meant that you had to play for the ballet classes. I remember this very stern ballet master. I was all prepared to play pieces in three, pieces in four, pieces in two; armed with polkas and minuets and waltzes and everything else that needed to be done. She looked at me and said, "Who are you? I haven't seen you before." There wasn't a hello, there wasn't a "Nice to meet you, new music director of the Oakland Ballet." It was just, "Who are you? Well, give us something in three. Ready, go." I jumped and started playing and through the course of that one-hour class - I can't ever remember being more humiliated in my life - this woman blamed every misstep of the corps de ballet on the lousy accompanist she had been given that day. That course in humility lasted for almost nine months and then I finally graduated from that stage.
But what came out of that horrible year was a very deep reflex to what is and what is not organic, because you can't actually fool gravity. You can't fool the human body. When the human body goes up and has a number of feats to perform within the amount of time that gravity allows the human body to be in the air; it is a real and very organic phenomenon. As a musician, watching the laws of nature, watching the laws of gravity, watching the human body perform, if you just abstract that slightly, it gives you all the lessons of rubati, of flexibility and time and tempo, as well as a tremendous concept of metronomic pulse. The dancers rely upon you as a musician to support them, and they don't function in mechanical regularity. They're human bodies and they're fighting and they're competing against the laws of gravity. This natural organic flexibility was a tremendous thing to learn early on in my career.
Starr: Carrying on the relationship of the body to music, what about choral music? Does that present special challenges or a special pleasure?
Nagano: It is a special challenge. Some of the greatest repertoire that we have has a choral element to it. Choruses are very important to the repertoire in a number of reasons. The vast majority of choruses are at least semi-community choruses; they draw from the community in which that arts institution sits. It's an immediate way for the community to participate in the creation of art for that moment, for that evening. And it's a huge responsibility for a music director to respect the chorus, and to make sure that they respect the music, because through this exchange it's as if the public has come onto the stage and they have a chance to participate in the music making.
In this country one of the biggest challenges is to teach choruses how to pronounce international languages - German, French, Italian. And in America we have to, yes, we have to teach choruses how to sing English because we don't speak English in this country. We speak "American," which is different. I would say that is one of the biggest challenges because usually a large percentage of the choir doesn't understand what it is they're singing about. If you don't understand the meaning of the words it's a tremendous obstacle to being able to communicate the content of a work.
Starr: You mentioned the four pounds' loss in the Mahler symphony, which may go out now as the Nagano diet across this country. That brings to mind the question of preparation. There's an emotional, almost an athletic encounter with the music that the conductor has. How do you prepare in terms of studying the scores and then moving on to conducting itself, or is each case different?
Nagano: I feel very fortunate in that I can have a real choice of the repertoire that I do conduct. Early in a conductor's career there's such a need for experience that many times you find yourself conducting works that you may not even believe in. That's very, very difficult. The great repertoire, as we know, are great works of art, and great works of art demand study for an entire lifetime.
One of the stories I love to tell is my first lesson with Leonard Bernstein. I was nervous beyond belief. I was really quaking in my boots as I rang the doorbell on the Dakota. His maid opened the door and said, "Yes, Maestro Bernstein's expecting you. Follow me." We went down through a corridor to the back room, which is his study and his library. Bernstein was sitting at his piano with a very upset and pained expression on his face. He looked up and saw that I'd come into the room. He said, "Kent, come here. Sit down beside me. Sit at the piano. Let's play this together. You play the strings. I'll play the woodwinds and the brass." I recognized immediately that he was working on the Sixth Symphony, Tchaikovsky, "The Pathétique" slow movement. He said, "Let's play these bars together." We played through the bars slowly, and after a few bars he said, "Stop right there and tell me, Mr. Kent Nagano, why is this note an A and not an A flat?"
I had known Leonard Bernstein for maybe 45 seconds and I was terrified. Sitting there next to this great maestro on the same piano bench, sweating like Old Faithful, I was so hot and perspiring. I just didn't know what to say. That silence must have lasted a good 50 seconds, which, if you're feeling uncomfortable, seems like 50 years. Finally, I said, "I'm really sorry, Mr. Bernstein. I don't know." He said, "Goddamnit! I don't know it either! I've got to find an answer because I have to conduct the New York Philharmonic tomorrow. When I stand up in front of the Philharmonic I better know why that's an A-natural and not an A flat."
I realized only several years later what an incredible moment that was. To see the great Bernstein sitting at the piano restudying "The Pathétique Symphony," which he must have conducted hundreds of times, re-looking at the various passages and asking the same questions, which of course don't have an answer, and being tortured over these questions and somehow needing to come up with for that moment the appropriate answer, it was a great lesson, which supports what I just said: For the great repertoire, they are works in which you immerse yourselves for a lifetime.
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