The Unrepentant Modernist

Near the end of Parallels and Paradoxes, a recent collection of dialogues on music and society between the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim, music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO), and his good friend, the scholar and music critic Edward Said, there is an extraordinary moment when the two men discuss the perspective of the past. Barenboim, bravely extolling the virtues of such Modernist radicals as Carter, Boulez and Birtwistle, not only puts them in the company of Beethoven but insists that we think of Beethoven the way we think of them: "He's a modern composer.... The most important thing is to arrive at a way to play Beethoven with a sense of discovery, as if it were being written today." Invigorating stuff.

Yet Said can't quite go along: "But what about the pathos of the past?... There's a kind of ruthlessness in history.... One feels that certain things are irrecoverable because they are past." For a musical example he offers the Berg Violin Concerto, a tragic and deeply expressive (and universally beloved) Modernist work that ends with the quotation of a Bach chorale--something the conductor finds hard to accept.

Barenboim: I'm bothered by it, because...somehow it introduces a foreign element into the structure, into the piece.

Said: But what if you were told by him... "Well, I intended it."

Barenboim: Yes, I'm sure. Well, I'm still bothered by it.

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